


venari virtute

by hupsoonheng



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blood and Torture, Case Fic, Comfort, Curses, Dissociation, Draco Malfoy Goes to Therapy, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Harry Potter Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Harry Potter Needs Therapy, Head Auror Harry Potter, Isolation, Lonely Harry Potter, M/M, Mental Health Issues, POV Draco Malfoy, Panic Attacks, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Rabies Symptoms, Slow Burn, Unredeemed Draco Malfoy, Wandless Draco Malfoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2019-10-29 18:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 57,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17812868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hupsoonheng/pseuds/hupsoonheng
Summary: Fifteen years after the war's end, a new, deadly curse has broken the peace of wizarding Britain. It spreads like a virus, and the Ministry has found no way to contain it or cure it. The case lands on Head Auror Potter's desk, and with it, a contract for Dark Arts scholar Draco Malfoy's expertise to help find the origin of the curse before it's too late.Complicating the issue, of course, is the fact that Draco never got over Harry Potter.Featuring Draco going to therapy, and Harry reallyneedingtherapy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm excited to post the beginning of my second hp fic ever! i'm not sure how long it will be, although i have the story more or less plotted out to the end; that T rating should stay correct, though.

It began, for the Ministry, with Sheila Tully. 

It was a bright, dewy morning that dawned across Diagon Alley, spring finally beating back winter's chill. No shops were open yet, but shop owners and clerks alike still darted through jangling doors with steaming cups of coffee and tea, readying their stores for the day's commerce. It was Thaddeus Dendron, the opening attendant at Madam Malkin's who noticed the shambling figure coming up the street, his hand still on the door's handle as he held it partially open. 

"Are you alright?" Thaddeus called out, squinting to make out the figure's shape. A witch, her robes bedraggled, each foot dragging forward with the gait of someone on the brink of total exhaustion. She didn't even look at him, much less give any other indication she had heard him. He recognized her, in fact, as a customer he had helped fit with new seasonal robes just two weeks ago; the robes that hung askew from her sagging shoulders now were the ones he had sold her himself, and their off-kilter sleeves nearly hid the wand she clutched in pale-knuckled fingers. 

Nearly. 

Thaddeus was quick to spot the wand, quick to put together all the pieces of the strange and threatening scene and shut himself into the shop, but the clerk at Flourish & Blott's just next door hadn't had the time to be so quick. Thaddeus knew her to be a recent Hogwarts graduate, a rising star known to have excelled at all her studies who worked at Flourish & Blott's while she wisely thought over her career choices—by all accounts, a powerful witch. 

It was, unfortunately, exactly what Sheila Tully was looking for. The young clerk had barely emerged from the shop when Sheila's drawn face rose, twisted with frantic pain, and she thrust her wand out to shout, " _Venari Virtute!_ " 

The spell that shot across the cobblestoned street was a sickly yellow, crackling as it flew, and when it hit the clerk she collapsed as though she were a marionette with cut strings, a pile of limbs going in all the wrong directions. Working witches and wizards all along Diagon's thoroughfare rushed from their storefronts to the clerk's aid, and none of them could know what a mistake this was. In a post-Voldemort world, there was no more sitting back in the face of violence and evil, so really, there was no other choice left to any of them. 

Sheila cast the curse three more times before Aurors Apparated onto the scene and Stunned her into submission. In total, four victims, all of them alive but unresponsive. The Healers at St. Mungo's were at a loss, and it seemed they would have to play a waiting game for their patients to wake up. 

It took twenty four hours, and all four patients woke on their own, heaving themselves from their hospital beds and out of their rooms. They wrenched wands from their waiting loved ones, and all through the corridors of St. Mungo's, the words _Venari Virtute!_ echoed over and over again as Sheila's victims struck down witch after wizard with the very same curse that had flattened them the previous day. 

Sheila, for her part, died soon afterward in Auror holding, twitching and screaming till her last breath. When her corpse was examined, she was so dehydrated that her skin tented in stiff peaks when the examiner pulled at it. There was nothing in her stomach, or anywhere in her digestive tract at all, in fact, except a handful of ulcers. 

It became known as the Rabid Dog Curse, despite the incantation translating to something else entirely: _Power hunt. Venari Virtute._ Minister Shacklebolt made it a Ministry-wide case, with the specific task of finding the origin of the curse—be it cursed object or dark mage—falling to the Aurors, headed by one Harry Potter. Find the origin, find a cure, the logic went. 

And to help Head Auror Potter and his team, one Draco Malfoy, contracted until the case's end by the Ministry for his scholarly expertise in the Dark Arts. 

☾

It's been fifteen years since the end of the war, and fifteen years since the Wizengamot took Draco's wand in exchange for his freedom, but he still feels unsettled as he steps into the lift at the Ministry of Magic. In any other context, he'd feel ridiculous for taking the lift a single storey, especially heading _down_ , but he doesn't want to ask where the stairs are. He doesn't even know if there _are_ stairs, and he certainly doesn't want to speak to anyone. 

Fifteen years, and still he receives sidelong looks, frowning glances, surreptitious lips muttering _Isn't that...?_ as he passes. He breathes through his nose as he wedges himself into the corner of the lift car, focusing on small actions like pressing the button for Level Two, and on the weight of his bag full of research digging into his shoulder. 

His therapist says he doesn't deserve it; she even says he didn't deserve the outright jeers and attempted assaults when he was just barely of age. He's supposed to at least try to take her words to heart. 

"Level Two," the lift's smooth voice sings out, and Draco is already slipping through the doors as it lists the associated offices of Magical Law Enforcement. His quick pace is meant to look as though he's walking with purpose, rather than hurried along by his own anxiety; he thinks it might be working. If he's walking too fast to see if anyone's looking at him, that's just a bonus. 

A young man with twisting hands and a buzzing energy greets him at the door that leads to the Auror offices. "You must be Mr. Malfoy?" he says, as if he's unsure. 

Draco quashes his natural urge to be snide, because who else could he be? The papers have certainly always zeroed in on his high Black forehead, highlighted as it's become over the years by his receding hairline. "Yes," he grits out at last, smoothing the word down just as it emerges. 

"Right this way," the young man says, pushing floppy brown hair out of his eyes. Draco supposes, as he follows his quick-footed escort, that there'd be no requirement of professionalism in Potter's Auror office. Draco is led to a heavy-looking door, and he notices as the young man—alright, certainly a secretary—knocks three times upon its surface that Potter's name is nowhere to be found on it. A tarnished plaque simply reads HEAD AUROR and no more. 

Draco imagines the office inside, within the few seconds of waiting for permission to enter. A mess, likely, and Potter will match it, if his secretary's untamed hair and hastily-tied robes are anything to go by. Potter's appearance has ceased to be public knowledge since his ascension, but Draco remembers Potter's perpetually untidy hair and clothes well enough from school. 

"Enter," comes a voice from behind the heavy door. The secretary pushes at the door with a tense hand, and backs away. Draco rolls his eyes as he saunters inside. 

He stops just as he closes the door behind him, eyes darting around the room before settling on Harry Potter. "Please," Potter says, gesturing with one hand before clasping it with the other again. "Sit." 

The room is frighteningly bare. The only files seem to be the thick folder just at Potter's right elbow on the desk, and the walls and desktop are bereft of photos, knick knacks, or any other personal ephemera that would indicate a person inhabited this space. The space the massive desk puts between Potter and his guest is all the more yawning for it; Draco imagines the desk is big for a reason, given the workload a Head Auror must have, and yet Potter has put none of it to use. 

More off-putting is Potter himself. His hair has been buzzed clean off, despite rumors that his hair was uncuttable, which puts the jagged scar on his forehead on stark display. In sharp contrast to his rumpled peon outside, his robes are stern and pressed, his shirt beneath buttoned to his throat, and he sits straight and symmetrical, hands folded together. The tip of his left pinky is missing, and thick ropes of scar tissue stretch across the top knuckles of his other hand, making sharp contrast with his dark brown skin. His face behind his square glasses is impassive. 

Draco sits, refusing to be intimidated by this strange, Spartan display. "Potter," he says, forgetting to choose between smirking familiarity and cold professionalism and getting an awkwardly muddled tone between. 

"Mr. Malfoy," Potter says, with a curt nod of acknowledgement. _Mr._ Malfoy? "Let's get right to business." He slides the folder forward with his right hand, tucking the fingers of his left into a loose fist on the desk and hiding his pinky. There's something about his voice that makes Draco feel like he's walked into a trap, like perhaps there's a flask of Polyjuice in the room he has yet to detect. "How much do you know about this case?" 

Well, Draco can be professional, too. He's getting paid for this, after all. "At first," he says, tugging his thick sheaf of research from his bag as neatly as he can, "only what made the papers. A viral curse, turning each witch or wizard it affects into a rabid host looking to cast the curse next. But it's clear to me that this curse has a root." He lays his parchment next to the folder. "That much must be clear to Minister Shacklebolt as well, as he's asked me to find that root." 

"He's asked the Aurors to find that root, and you are to help us to that end." Potter says it so matter-of-factly that Draco finds it hard to discern whether he's been corrected or if Potter simply hadn't listened to his last words, speaking over him instead. 

Draco draws his bottom lip between his teeth, then hears his mother's voice telling him it's uncouth and releases it. "Right. Of course." 

"I would like you to take this folder," Potter says, giving the folder another nudge toward Draco, "while I look over your research, if I may." _If I may._ Words he’d never thought Potter would say, especially not to him, nor sincerely. "Auror Larch will show you to your desk." 

"You don't want to go over it together?" Draco says with a frown. "My research is—" 

"Thank you, Mr. Malfoy." Potter cuts him off as simply as if Draco were a student and he a professor. 

Auror Larch—the young man Draco had thought to be a secretary—arrives in the doorway as if Summoned, and Draco scoops up the Ministry folder with a barely-concealed huff. He knows better than to press the issue; it may be a full fifty years after the way before he feels comfortable throwing his negligible weight around. He still can't stand it. 

His desk is out in the open with the rest of them, although at least it's close to the door. Wooden cubicle walls give lip service to privacy, but not much more. Draco also notes that the cubicle walls block some of the nearest light, casting the very desk where he'll be expected to read and write extensively into shadow. He'll have to bring in a lamp. 

Draco spends the rest of the day poring over the file Potter's given him. Loaned him. Whatever. He doesn't have that lamp in yet, nor can he cast his own spells, but Auror Larch is only too happy to cast a _Lumos_ and leave it suspended over Draco's desk. He doesn't know why Larch seems so excited to see him, but he does wish Larch had conjured him a little lampshade, too, because every time he so much as glances up, the low-hanging ball of light leaves its burning impression on his retinas. 

The body count is so much higher than Draco had known. The only survivors so far are the victims most recently cursed, and by the look of things, their days are certainly numbered. 

He taps a thoughtful finger toward the bottom of the list of victims. Auror Blair Pertinger, the only MLE employee to have been struck—and she's still alive. She's been placed in "protective custody" at St. Mungo's, which is a confounding combination of words if ever he's seen one. 

"Auror Larch," Draco calls without looking up, and Larch is at his elbow within seconds, startling him. "Are you some kind of assistant?" he asks, instead of the request he was about to make. 

"Oh, well," Larch says with a nervous giggle. "Newest to the department. You know how it is." 

"I certainly don't know," Draco says, with a dry voice and arched brows. "Are you or aren't you?" 

"We all have to earn our way up," Larch says, which is no more of an answer than his last. 

"Is that what Potter says?" Draco sits back, studying Larch and his increasingly frantic hands. 

"No! No. It's just—it's how things have always been. I'm happy to be helpful." Larch's hands twist so much the knuckles pop like frying oil. "Was there something you wanted, Mr. Malfoy?" 

"Yes, actually." Draco reaches toward his face before reminding himself his glasses are at home, where they belong, though he supposes they'll have to live behind these thin partitions now, before he strains his eyes into oblivion. "I need the personnel file for Auror Pertinger." 

"Pers—" Larch's brows knit into a frown. "Why? She's on leave." 

Draco stops cold. "On leave?" he repeats, slowly. 

"Oh yes. Her mother is desperately sick, I've heard." 

"Have you." Draco turns his gaze back to the list, checking to be sure he didn't mean some other auror. "Be that as it may, I'd like to see her file." 

"I can't, sir. It's not pertinent to the case." 

"I say it's pertinent to the case," Draco says, sitting up straighter. "If you're happy to be helpful, fetch it for me." 

"You're not MLE, sir. I can't." 

" _You_ are the one who asked _me_ if you could help, and I gave you an answer as to how you could. Fetch me the personnel file of Auror Pertinger or so help me, I will go looking for it myself, and—" Draco can already hear the end of the sentence echoing through his head. Something haughty, and threatening; the words of a man speaking to a servant. He closes his throat off, then sighs, sinking back into his chair before he even realizes he'd begun to stand. "Please, Auror Larch. It's very important." 

Larch rolls his lips between his teeth, glancing around. Draco's aborted tantrum seems to have earned them some sharp looks, and Larch doesn't look so helpful anymore. 

"Please," Draco says again. He hates how desperate he sounds. "For the case." 

"Just for the case," Larch agrees at last, after making a too-long study of Draco's face. "Alright." And he sweeps off. 

How pathetic for a Malfoy to have to beg a boy barely out of school robes for anything, much less material for a paid job. That's what Lucius would say. Draco busies himself with further case notes, drowning out his father's voice with details of victims' distressed aversion to food and drink. Whoever manufactured this curse must have modeled it closely after rabies—not that that's any revelation, given the spell's public nickname. Draco thinks it should join the short list of Unforgivable Curses—even Avada Kedavra is fast, and the Cruciatus rarely takes lives. Venari Virtute has a fatality of 100% thus far, each victim dying in slow agony and borderline dementia. 

Despite Draco's fears, Larch makes his return with the personnel file in hand. He thanks Larch softly, and watches the young man dip his head into Potter's office before walking out of sight, likely to his own desk. Draco assumes he's keeping Potter abreast of _Mr. Malfoy's_ odd requests. 

Strange, Draco muses as he opens Pertinger's folder atop the case files, that any Auror, even one so wet behind the ears, should be ignorant of a coworker's injury status. According to the case files, Pertinger was hit with the curse on duty, trying to take down the latest lunatic victim before they spread the curse any further. Even Potter must surely know that compartmentalization can be taken too far, hindering his little Ministry-approved army of brutes—and he'd never taken Potter for the secretive type, anyway. 

Pertinger's personnel file paints a woman at the top of her game. Clever and shrewd, with a high solve rate; she's noted for casting particularly forceful hexes, with someone writing that her _Stupefy_ feels less like a punch and more like cannonfire. She's broken perpetrators' ribs multiple times. He pages back to find that she was a bullheaded student at Hogwarts—a Gryffindor, naturally, with little patience or respect for authority, but with a strong aptitude for DADA spells in particular. A truly powerful witch. 

Draco doesn't realize how long he's been reading until he stands, at last, and his hips creak in protest, his legs tingling. The Malfoy line is not known for strong joints. He strides to Potter's door, knocking thrice as Larch had. When no invitation to enter results, he knocks again. "Potter," Draco calls out, only a little bit demanding. 

"Oh, Head Auror Potter's gone home," Larch says from the dark corner, fingers tangling with anxiety as he steps forward. Draco wonders if his hands ever get stuck together. "Most of the office have. It's just us." 

"Gone home?" Draco repeats, upper lip curling as he looks first at Larch then at Potter's door. "Without so much as a by your leave?" 

"Well," Larch says, "seeing as he's Head—" 

"Yes, I know very well he's Head Thingy," Draco snaps, huffing. "It's an expression, Larch, _please_ do tell me you've heard of expressions." 

"I have," Larch sniffs, his already ruddy face coloring. His hands duck behind his back now. "Are you done for the night?" 

Draco sighs, giving Potter's door one last disgusted look. "I suppose I am, yes. And they left you behind to make sure I don't waltz out of the Ministry with an armful of stolen files and goods?" 

"To lock the door behind you, Mr. Malfoy." Larch skips expertly over Draco's long-winded words, for someone who had just tried to explain that Potter needed no one's leave. "Shall we?" 

"The files—" 

"Will remain here," Larch says, "as they're MLE property." 

"Aurors don't take home their work, do they?" 

"You're not an Auror, sir." 

Draco mouths Larch's words with a cartoonish sneer and pop of his eyebrows as he collects his bag. Potter had never given him back his research, so he can't even cross reference from memory, and his bag looks deflated and sad without parchment stuffing it to its black leather gills. Larch walks so close at his heels he threatens to step on them as he escorts Draco to the door, and Draco is left to twiddle his thumbs while Larch fails twice to produce the correct key to lock up. When Larch follows him to the lifts he wants to say something cutting about being able to find his own way out, but it's not like Larch doesn't need to go home, too. 

The Manor wards ripple gently as Draco Apparates into the front hall. He steps out of his shoes and arranges them by the door, hangs his empty bag on a wrought iron coat rack next to them. Fourteen years ago, he would still swish his wandless hand as he entered his home—muscle memory. Now in his early thirties, Draco is used to his Squib existence. 

There are no more house elves in Malfoy Manor, either. Draco cooks his own meals, chopping vegetables and sautéing meat like a Muggle—by hand. He's purchased a few modified appliances to make the job easier—a food processor and a stand mixer, charmed to be able to work in magical homes—but they're poor replacements for cooking spells, which are still a distant second to elf-made food. Oh, and he's had to buy a refrigerator. 

Draco settles into the sitting room with his dinner of pork cutlet and roasted asparagus on a tea tray balanced on his lap, holding a letter from his mother in one hand. He received the letter this morning, but in his rush to the Ministry he'd just set it aside for later. 

It is, as he suspected, mostly drivel ending with yet another invitation to join her on the continent. Narcissa Malfoy swans from the house in Italy to the house in France and back as the weather and her mood dictate. She is not wandless, though her every spell is tracked by the Ministry through a charm created during the war trials. Draco wonders, sometimes, what made her seem so much more harmless than he—a child, at the time, pale with fright. Then he remembers what Potter said at her trial, about how he could not have survived without her courageous lie to the Dark Lord or something equally as puffed up. 

But he won't be leaving the Manor. He finishes his dinner, does his own washing up, and pens a trite response to his mother that acknowledges her mundane European adventures and utterly ignores her plea for his company. He mentions, with just a few words, that he's been contracted by the Ministry; she'll like that. Then he ties the letter to the leg of Archimedes, his very moody horned owl, and spends the rest of his evening reading a Muggle novel before heading to bed at a reasonable hour, in one of the only bedrooms left unlocked. 

Most of the Manor is sealed off now. Before Narcissa left for Europe the first time, she'd cast locking charms on so many of the rooms tainted by the occupation rather than look at them ever again. Without his wand, Draco is powerless to reopen them, but he doesn't have any desire to ever look at the drawing room where he was asked to identify Harry Potter for Voldemort's killing pleasure. 

☾

The following morning as Larch welcomes him into the office with a too-cheery “Good morning!” Draco notes, with mild annoyance, that Auror Pertinger's file has been taken from his desk. The case files have been replaced with his research, as if he's not allowed to possess both at the same time. Without even taking his bag off, he strides to Potter's door, and knocks in rapid fire. 

"Enter," Potter's voice comes, right as Draco pauses in his knocking to give his knuckles a short break. 

"Firstly," Draco says as he swings the door open, "I want the case files back. I can hardly cross reference my research thus far without them." 

Potter frowns, but doesn't move from his desk. "Alright." At least today there's some semblance of work on Harry's desk, spread out in the unorganized way he expected to see. 

"Secondly," Draco says, hurrying to his next point—he had so many arguments ready for why he needed the case files back, and Potter's taken some of the wind out of his sails by simply acquiescing. "I want to see Auror Pertinger." 

"No." Potter's refusal is instantaneous and cold, made all the worse when the word simply hangs between them. No explanation, no apology—just no. 

"I know she's not on leave," Draco says, gripping the back of the single chair in front of Potter's desk to lean his weight on it. 

"I know you know that. You read the full case files, which I put in your hands myself." 

Draco doesn't like this Potter one bit. He's always had a tempestuous relationship with Potter, but at least the Potter he grew up with—fiery, impetuous, disrespectful, certainly a streak of martyrdom—was a known quantity. The Potter he's faced with now is an immovable object, and if manipulation works on him, it's outside of Draco's usual bag of tricks. 

"Then you'll understand, _won't you_ , that if I want to see Auror Pertinger, then there must be a case-related _reason_ for it?" Draco says, fingers digging into the upholstered back of the chair. 

"You will not see Auror Pertinger." 

"Then you must not want to solve this case." 

Potter looks up at that, and for a second, there's a flicker of his old self in his eyes. Draco waits for Potter to shout, to call Draco out for questioning his dedication to justice, maybe to even take him off the case. None of it pleasant, no, but he'd honestly feel more at ease. 

"What do you want from her?" 

"I need to observe her," Draco says, finally taking a seat now that he senses he might be getting somewhere. "I already understand I can't question her." 

"You wouldn't question her regardless—you're not an Auror," Potter says. 

"So I've heard!" Draco says, then blinks slowly as he dulls the sharpness in his voice. "Hobbling me for not being an official part of your department will not solve the case. I just want to see her." 

When Potter sits back, it's a slight motion, given that his back is already ramrod straight, but Draco takes instant heed, and schools his face to reflect minimal, professional interest. "You cannot share anything you see today with anyone else."

"Of course," Draco says, buzzing with even this small victory. "Total secrecy." 

Potter gets to his feet. "And we'll be going now." 

"Absolutely." Draco stands as well. He won't be caught giving Potter any reason to deny him. 

Following behind Potter, he's astonished to realize the man's grown several inches since they were both 17, which doesn't seem right. Potter towers over everyone in the office as he sweeps through with his hands clasped behind his back, and he only lets Auror Larch know he's leaving. He says nothing to Draco in the lift, but gives tiny polite nods to the Ministry employees entering the lift as he and Draco depart into the lobby. 

Draco reminds himself to focus on the case, and not how unnerving he finds Potter. The case is what will earn him his Galleons, as well as a bit of polish back to the Malfoy name. 

From the lobby, at least, the trip isn't so long. They Floo one after the other to St. Mungo's; by the time Draco has stepped through, the Boy Who Lived Again has already put his celebrity status to work and skipped the bureaucratic nature of St. Mungo's waiting room, led past the desk by an orderly. Draco scurries after them as the orderly takes her first of many turns. 

He's never been in this part of St. Mungo's before. 

"In here," the orderly says, standing five feet from the door at which she's gesturing. "Do you want me to wait for you?" 

"No," Potter murmurs, frowning at the door. He puts his hand on the doorknob. 

"Wait," Draco says, although he's not sure why, which means if Potter asks him why he should wait he's unlikely to have a satisfactory answer. 

Instead, Potter's hand pulls away from the knob, rejoining its compatriot behind his back as he looks at Draco with mild curiosity. 

"Let me observe her on my own." 

"Why?" 

It's as fair a question as any, and Draco has no solid answer. There's just something that's been trying to jump out at him from all the data he's seen so far, but he can't put words to it yet. "I have a feeling," he says, nearly wincing as he says it. A child's reason. 

But Potter nods. "I'll give you a few minutes." 

Draco can't bring himself to say thank you, but he can at least keep himself from saying anything awful, and instead moves to the door in silence. He pushes through, hoping Pertinger isn't asleep. 

And as soon as he's inside, he wishes Pertinger _was_ asleep. For himself, because Pertinger's manic eyes are on him with his first step inside, but for Pertinger as well, with her ragged breathing, limbs twitching and shuddering under tight restraints. A coma would probably be a treat for her. 

At first, Draco says nothing, walking a wide circle around the edge of the hospital room. Despite the room's size and other empty beds, there are no other patients housed here. A translucent pouch of clear liquid hangs nearby, and Draco thinks he remembers that it's spelled to release hydration and nutrients within the paired patient's body at intervals. When Pertinger continues to simply watch him, he edges closer. 

Despite the medical hydration charm, her lips are cracked and dry, and she shows him why when she swipes a sticky tongue across them. She's been muttering something this whole time, he realizes, and he leans closer. 

It's the incantation. _Venari Virtute._ Over and over, under her wheezing breath. Her spasming hand holds an invisible wand, flicking violently every time she finishes the second word. 

"Auror Blair Pertinger," Draco says, trying to sound conversational as he stands just out of arm's reach from her bed. Her arms are snug under the restraints, but there's no sense in trusting bits of leather. "Do you know who I am?" 

She gives no indication that she's heard him, much less understood the question. It's not a self-important one; he knows his face is recognizable, for better or worse, and usually the latter these days. She seems to have lost interest in him entirely, in fact, and her eyes are casting around the room as she continues to mutter. 

"You know, people usually can't stop looking at me," Draco snorts, speaking to her freely the way one might to a cat. "I like that you don't care, Pertinger. It's refreshing." 

The knob turns. Pertinger's head snaps forward, her eyes locked on the door, and as Potter enters, she begins to scream. 

" _VENARI VIRTUTE! VENARI VIRTUTE!"_ Pertinger bellows, her feet scrabbling at the bottom of her bed as she arches her whole body away from the mattress. Her arms strain against the leather straps, and her wand hand has made a tense fist as it twists with each incantation. " _VENARI VIRTUTE!"_ Her eyes are lidless, fixed only on Potter, and whatever Potter thought he might say has been buried under her screams. 

"What have you done?" Potter demands in the space between incantations, glaring at Draco. 

"She's reacting to you, you prat!" Draco retorts in the next space, backing toward the wall with a firm eye on Pertinger. 

There's a loud crack as one of the straps breaks open, and Pertinger's wand hand rises like the grasping hand of an Inferi, before pointing its phantom wand at Potter. " _VENARI VIRTUTE!"_ she howls, and her lips start to bleed from how wide she stretches her mouth around the sound. 

" _Stupefy!"_ Potter calls right back, tearing his wand from his sleeve to blast Pertinger with a Stunning Spell. It lands at her throat, and she falls back to the bed, gasping and shaking, but her eyes are still open. For once since Draco began this case, there's emotion painted across Potter's face, his expression sick with anger and despair. He Stuns her again, and she goes limp, her wand arm hanging over the edge of the thin mattress. 

"This," Potter says, "was a bad idea." He whirls on his heel and exits the room in three long strides. 

Draco doesn't follow him out. Instead he watches Pertinger, his brain a spinning mass of cogs clicking together. She'd had no interest in Draco, but had wanted to curse Potter so badly she'd summoned superhuman strength just to take her shot. He finally trots out of the room, in time to have the entering orderly shoot him a nasty look. 

"I need—" he begins, but Potter holds up a silencing finger. 

"No more field trips," Potter says. "The Ministry hired you on as a scholar—a source of information and research at the Auror department's convenience." 

"Okay, well—" Whatever that's got to do with the price of peas in Persepolis, Draco doesn't know, but he needs to act on his new theory before the idea fades. 

"You will not leave your desk during work hours, from now on, except for reasonable breaks, and you will not leave the Auror offices during those breaks." 

Draco nearly reaches down to pick up his jaw that must surely be on the floor. "I'm sorry?" 

"I don't know why I thought I should listen to you, or treat you like part of the team," Potter says with a glower. 

"I was not hired on," Draco growls, "to be an encyclopedia! I was hired to do my own research and yes, turn that research over to you and your precious Aurors, but this visit was part of that research!" 

"I say what you were hired to do!" Potter snaps. A cold thrill goes up Draco's spine at Potter's anger, and as much as he doesn't want to jeopardize this job, there's a rush in breaking through Potter's new icy exterior. He _knew_ Potter couldn't have changed that much. 

"What matters more, Potter?" Draco wants to know, taking one bold step toward Potter. Just one, because he's still cautious. "Making sure I feel excluded, putting me in my place? Or solving this case before even more people die?" 

Potter's nostrils flare, wand clutched in a fist at his hip. "I will not be led by you." 

"How prideful," Draco sneers. "Will it be your pride that brings Pertinger back from _that?_ " He points at the door of Pertinger's room. 

"Be quiet, Malfoy," Potter hisses. 

"I know what pride gets you," Draco goes on, heedless of the warning tone in Potter's low voice. "And that's _nothing._ " 

"I know where trusting a Malfoy gets you, too," Potter says, narrowing his eyes. And he doesn't even have to elaborate; both men know the answer. 

He could never ask Potter to trust him, not in so many words. He knows he has carved himself into an untrustworthy person with his earliest choices, no matter how much he's chipped away as an adult. 

"I promise you this much," Draco says at last, breaking the ugly silence between them. "I only want to help. Please let me do that." 

"You want to do whatever you please, is what you want," Potter says without looking at him. 

"In this moment, I am just a scholar with a theory. Please, Potter." _Please, Potter._ The words burn his lips and tongue as they roll across. 

"This is how you tricked me in my office." 

"I don't see how I tricked you. What do you think I did in that room?" Draco asks, sincerely curious. "Or don't you remember I have no wand?" 

Potter's lips press together in a wide, flat slit. "I don't know." 

"Be reasonable. I'm powerless." He holds up his empty hands. 

"You sound just like your father," Potter says, softly. 

Draco jerks back as if he's been slapped, so suddenly he nearly loses his balance. He wants to say he's going back to the Ministry. Or home. He needs to be away from Potter and his vile words, laced with hideous truth, because he'll never escape his father's influence, all the way down to blood and bone. He wants Potter to feel like—

"I need," Draco says again, from between grinding teeth, "to test my theory. Please. I just need a little more time with Pertinger, and then yes, you can chain me to my desk for eternity." 

"No," Potter says, almost whispering. 

"There was a reason she reacted so exceptionally to you but ignored me, I know it," Draco insists. "Give me this." 

"No." 

"I only want to bring a handful of different witches and wizards in front of Pertinger. You can vet them; you can _choose_ them. I just want to see her reactions, and then back to the Ministry's darkest cubicle with me. I promise." He can't even look up anymore. 

"What you want is to torture Pertinger, whether you mean it that way or not. No." 

"Potter! You pigheaded arse!" Draco stops himself before he stamps his foot like the spoiled child he once was. "What do you want from me?" 

"Nothing you could ever give me." All of Potter's familiar anger has washed away, replaced by the frightening, steely Potter who calls him Mr. Malfoy. 

Again the urge to flee seizes Draco by the throat, but he roots his feet to the tiled floor. "Don't make this about us." 

"You always did," Potter says, and his voice is full of soft danger. 

"You can't," Draco says, eyes fluttering shut for a moment, "pretend you don't know me _and_ hold our past against me." 

"Don't you know? I'm the Boy Who Lived Again." Potter's expression is so lazy and disdainful, as his eyes take in all of Draco's unimpressive form, that Draco wants to slap it off his face. "I can do just about anything." 

It is the ultimate shutdown. There is no combination of words Draco could ever come up with that would make for an adequate response. 

"Give me just a little time with Pertinger," Draco says anyway. "It's the only thing I'll ask of you." 

Potter's eyes flash. "The only thing?" 

It's not a promise Draco can make. "Yes," he says. "The only thing." 

Potter takes his time in putting his wand back into the holster up the sleeve of his Auror robes, pushing his glasses up his nose, then re-clasping his hands behind his back. 

"Who do you need?" he asks, and relief floods Draco's body, despite being tinged with dread. 

Potter allows a mere four people to enter Pertinger's room. Draco has to work fast, darting about St. Mungo's and interrogating people about their magical prowess without tripping over hospital staff. His final lineup consists of a Squib, a Healer known to make quick work of just about any magical injury, a Hogwarts fifth year who couldn't put down his homework, and the tired looking orderly who led them to Pertinger's room in the first place. Potter is entrusted with the wand of the student and the orderly, though he doesn't know _why_ he's holding the wands of two of the strangers marching in and out of Pertinger's room. 

Out of the four, Pertinger only tries to curse the Healer, though she doesn't try nearly as hard as she did to curse Potter. 

"I hope it was worth it," Potter says, with one last glance at Pertinger as the orderly puts her under. 

"It was," Draco assures him, and he cannot get back to his desk nor ink his quill fast enough before he's writing out his new theory on fresh parchment. 

Unfortunately, his theory has nothing to do with the source of the curse—not yet, anyway. It's ultimately a small piece of the puzzle, more to do with the curse's function than anything else. His entire next week—dutifully glued to his desk, as per Potter's instructions—is spent scribbling stream-of-consciousness notes on what his new findings mean, and how _much_ they mean given his woefully scrawny sample size. 

If he's right, then the curse has a life of its own within the cursed victim. Not just a victim anymore—a _host_ , living home to a curse that checks potential new victims for two things. First: A wand. Pertinger ignored both the wandless star Hogwarts student as well as Draco himself. 

And second, especially judging by Pertinger's reaction to Potter: A giant well of raw magical power. Pertinger herself was a prime victim, or host, being powerful herself. Draco hasn't been made humble enough yet not to see himself as a reasonably powerful wizard, too, but without a wand, it seems he doesn't rate. 

The question he still can't answer is _why_. 

Ten days into the case, Draco can no longer think while trapped in the oppressively shadowy corner that is his cubicle. Potter wants more out of Draco's scant few minutes spent with Pertinger, and Draco has nothing new. Potter had said he could still roam so long as it was inside the Auror offices, hadn't he? 

Walking brushes the rust from Draco's brain, lets his thoughts connect all the quicker, flowing into each other seamlessly. There are much fewer glances his way in the Auror offices, now that the Aurors have gotten used to their mean-faced new mascot, so Draco sets off around the track, which is to say the floor around the centralized pack of Auror desks. 

There's something about this curse that he's missing, and he'll have to suss it out without ever seeing Pertinger or another victim ever again, at least on Ministry hours. The press keeps the details of the curse quiet, ostensibly to protect readers from mass hysteria and panic, and damn them all for it. He's gone over the case files what feels like hundreds of times by now, and the whole thing is so frustratingly full of holes. The case files are just data collected from other sources, and many of those sources seem to have failed their due diligence. Curse fatalities have, in many cases, simply been listed with "V.V." as cause of death, and details are muddy or missing. The harder he thinks, the faster he walks. 

He stops by the door in the corner that leads to the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts office. It's a baffling setup, he thinks; did Weasley Sr. really have to walk the length of the Auror offices each morning to get to his own desk in a much tinier room, back when Draco was a child? 

It doesn't just lead to the Misuse office, of course. He pokes his head through the door. There's a whole corridor back here, with another door down by the other end he's never explored before. Draco should, of course, mind his own business. He should probably go back to his desk, in fact, and comb the case files for missed details. 

The sound of a sharp inhale nearly escapes him. 

There is no more hemming and hawing over whether the corridor is allowed to him. Draco knows that sound, and the ones that come after it when he pricks his ears, having made them himself plenty of times before starting therapy. He takes off for the mysterious door, and wrenches the door open, ready to help—

—Potter. 

Potter kneels on the rug of a sparsely-decorated room, facing away from the door with both hands on the back of his shorn head. He rocks gently in place, which does little to alleviate the way his staccato breaths sound like he's drawing them in through thick fabric. 

His thirteen year old self would mock Potter. His seventeen year old self would simply leave, neither harming nor helping. But Draco at thirty-two crosses the distance between himself and Potter, and kneels in kind as he puts firm hands on Potter's back. "You need to breathe," he says, impersonating his therapist. 

Potter's very skin seems to jump under Draco's touch, and he looks over his shoulder at Draco with eyes that are both panicked and glazed at the same time. His gaze puts a queasy lump in Draco's throat, but he forces it down. He tells himself he wouldn't be able to face his therapist if he'd found someone having a panic attack and not helped them through it, never mind who it is. 

"Like this," Draco says, and he repositions himself to kneel in front of Potter rather than beside him. He draws in a big, exaggerated breath, letting his chest puff up tall. Potter is not imitating him, but Draco breathes out with the same overwrought slowness anyway. "Do it with me." 

On the second try, Potter takes a shuddering breath. "Good," he says, despite the fact that Potter releases it immediately. "Again." 

Draco begins to count Potter through his breaths, steady beats up to the number seven before counting back down to zero. "You're okay," he reassures Potter through numb, disembodied lips. "You're okay." 

It's Draco's turn to jump when Potter lays his big, heavy head against his shoulder, his breaths finally coming evenly. His whole body radiates fatigue and pain. He doesn't remember doing this with his therapist; usually by now he'd be sitting back in a big, cushiony chair, finding all the nerves in his skin again. There are no cushiony chairs in this strange room though, and now Draco is afraid to move. 

Five minutes later, Potter finally sits up. Shame makes his features look soft and childish. 

"Thank you," he whispers, and is on his feet and exiting within seconds. Draco stays in the mystery room for a while longer, finding that now he, too, needs to reconnect with his corporeal form. 

The next morning, the news comes that Pertinger has lost all her magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i want to give thanks to spacehubsands, crowry, sunmoonandspoon and notcuddles for letting me ramble at all of them when the idea for this fic landed on my head as i was trying to fall asleep last week, to the cauldronzine server for hyping me up, to primavera-cerezos for helping me with tags, and a special thanks to spacehubsands for an excellent beta! i could not have written this as quickly as i did without all of you.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Draco attends a funeral, and the only thing that makes sense is work

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a big shoutout to Saphira in the drarry server for being an amazing beta for this chapter, and helping me firm up some future events!

Lucius Malfoy II is dead.

The news comes to Draco by way of a hastily penned owl from Narcissa, which includes the time and location of her Portkey arrival, given that she is forbidden Apparation. Ink blots surround her words from the speed at which her quill must have moved, and still her letter has only just beaten the Prophet to the manor's breakfast table. 

The death of a prominent and documented Death Eater is front page news, and true to the Prophet's history the article borders on salacious. Draco doesn't even mean to read it at first as he picks over his toast and eggs; the Prophet's purpose in the Malfoy home is mainly to line the floors of the owlery, though Archimedes is its only permanent resident. He tells himself, as he scans the page, that he's only reading it to have a dark chuckle at the media portrayal of his father. 

He throws the paper down the length of the table before he's even reached _Article continued on page 2_. Rubbish about the Malfoy family's fall from grace that focuses so much less on Lucius and his enabling of a violent, hateful man, and more on laughing at his vacationing wife and her hamstrung wand, and at his Squib-like son scrabbling for contract work like any drudge. 

Draco would hardly consider himself scrabbling. The manor is still his, and though much of the Malfoy wealth was seized in reparations, he and his mother have not been left destitute. The contract work keeps him comfortable, as he would put it. "And I'm not a _Squib_ ," he mutters as he finishes off a slice of his toast. 

The Ministry has released his father's body to the family for funerary arrangements, which is the only reason Narcissa has returned to England. Lucius will be added to the family catacombs below the manor, like every Malfoy before him, and Narcissa will perform the last rites that her wand has been cleared for. 

He receives notice, with official Ministry stationary, that he has been given bereavement leave of five days. The signature is from some communications flunky, not Potter. 

The funeral is held on the second day of his leave. It's a regular who's-who of pureblood families and all their intermarried cousins, and naturally that group includes former Death Eaters. No one close to Voldemort, of course; Azkaban took its pound of flesh, and then some, but the sheer volume of people with three or four degrees of separation from the Dark Lord himself means there are Aurors posted at the edges of the estate. There are some with a bit of a hunted look as they come through the wrought iron gates, eyeing the Aurors who only give them stern nods. 

Draco shakes hand after hand, receiving the stream of consolations for a loss he does not feel. He bows to wizards and witches old enough to see hand-shaking as new-fangled foofaraw, and they bow back before also giving their apologies for his loss. Pansy and Blaise are the only faces that stand out in the blur of funeralgoers, and he approaches them. 

"Oh Draco," Pansy sighs as they finally meet. "Should I say the thing? Just to be polite?" 

"I think you already know the answer," Draco says, glancing around. "I keep running into people who are asking me if I remember meeting them when I was six months old." 

"I must say, you don't seem particularly grief-stricken," Blaise notes, and gives an approving little nod. "Congratulations on your well-managed emotions." 

"You know very well I can't manage even one emotion, much less all of them." Draco's hands twitch with a desire to run them through his hair, but decades of being trained to keep his hands to himself and _especially_ away from his coiffed hair keep them at his side. 

"I was trying to be kind on this difficult day," Blaise scoffs. "You should have accepted my gift." 

"You don't give gifts at a funeral, Zabini," Pansy says with a smirk. 

"Oh no?" Blaise asks, arching one perfectly-shaped brow; it's hard to tell if he's being sarcastic, honestly. "A pity, and a lost opportunity as well." 

"As if you would give real gifts if that became tradition," Draco says, trying not to laugh loud enough for anyone else to notice. 

"My presence is a present, and my kindness is a treasure," Blaise says, almost sing-song in rhythm. "And if I presented myself as a gift, people might appreciate me more." 

Draco lets himself laugh at that, and for the next few minutes he's just content to listen to Pansy and Blaise banter. And yet—

"You know, Draco," Pansy says, as Blaise excuses himself to the lavatory inside the manor and heads off, "Blaise and I have both noticed what a recluse you've become." 

"What an ugly word to call me," Draco murmurs, watching Blaise sweep across the grounds with his hands clasped behind his back. Potter walks like that, only Blaise's hands are loose with ease, and Potter's whole body may as well be a fist. "Have I not returned your every infrequent owl, Pansy?" 

"Oh, don't pin it on me," she says with a scowl. "I got tired of always sending the first owl." 

"Well, you know Malfoy men," Draco says, gesturing toward the manor where his father's body waits. "Bastards, all of us." 

"Stop it, Draco." 

"I'm unfit for polite society," Draco continues, despite Pansy's tired look. "Did you see today's Prophet? I'm a Squib now. You can't be seen faffing about with me." 

"We haven't seen you in months." 

"Don't firecalls count as something you see?" 

"That was one firecall. In six months of never visiting us or inviting us." 

"I've been busy." Draco fixes his eyes on the back of his mother's head once he's spotted her, and wills her with every ounce of his nonexistent mind power to come and give him some silly task that requires him to be elsewhere. 

"Don't be an arse. At least tell me why." Pansy puts gentle fingers on Draco's forearm. "Please, Draco." 

Draco pulls his arm away, just by an inch or so. 

"I am spending enormous amounts of energy asking you gently so you won't run away like a frightened animal," Pansy growls. "And yet here you are, ready to bolt anyway." 

"My therapist says I have to confront my cowardice," Draco says primly, despite Dr. Fiddlewood having never said that. "I think I hear Mother calling." And he leaves Pansy's side, not even having to feign joining his mother as another ancient witch stops him to pay her respects to the grieving Malfoy heir, or whoever he's supposed to be. 

As the crowd makes its procession into the manor—the rites won't be held in the catacombs, but in a ballroom, after which the casket will be sent to the catacombs as part of the funerary spells—Draco sees Blaise and Pansy walking ahead. He wants so badly, for a moment, to call out to them, to apologize for being such a sorry friend, but once a coward, always a coward, and the words remain trapped behind his Adam's apple. 

Dr. Fiddlewood had actually told him that he must confront his _feelings of_ cowardice, but she'd forgotten, he supposes, that asking a coward to confront anything is a contradiction. He takes his seat in the front row as his mother takes the podium by the gleaming silver casket, and cannot see his jilted friends anymore. 

The eulogy is what anyone would expect at a funeral. All of Lucius Malfoy's mistakes and faults of character are distilled into a handful of strong, positive words. His bribe-like monetary donations become his generosity. His obsession with blood purity becomes a strong interest in preserving history. His need for a perfect son in his exact image now makes him a dedicated father. 

"And yet," Narcissa Malfoy concedes, "he made a grave error in who he chose to follow, and as his faithful spouse I made the same error." Draco glances over his shoulder to see surprised faces bobbing up in the crowd, just as his had. "I continue to live with this regret. My husband could not." 

She cries. In front of at least a quarter of the British pureblood community, she cries, though she is not so indecorous as to sob. Andromeda, at last, rises from her seat on the other side of the front row and takes her sister by the hand to lead her away from the podium. 

Lucius could not live with his regret, no. After years of cycling through several reactions to his incarceration—fury, pleading, attempted bribery, and finally unabashed sadness—he had fallen to listlessness, and could not be convinced or forced to eat or drink. He died, in fact, much like victims of Venari Virtute—just with less screaming. 

No one else comes to the podium in Narcissa's absence. Some look to him, the son, but Draco bows his head and pretends to be too sad to stand. They look away. 

He thinks of his proud father pushing away the scraps Azkaban must have given him, wasting away to a sliver of his arrogant self, and he is numb. There is no fresh loss when he has grieved his father since his sentencing to a lifetime in Azkaban; Lucius had given him a stiff nod before being led away and Draco had forced himself to stay stone faced. 

Nobody else has a kind word to say for Lucius Malfoy, and there's a long, uncomfortable silence while Andromeda helps her sister compose herself. One of the very few benefits of the war and all its following trials has been the reconciliation between the two non-murderous Black sisters. When Draco's mother returns to her husband's casket, she holds her wand aloft, and everyone stands as she begins last rites. 

Who must be watching the spells that come out of Narcissa's wand? Somewhere in the bowels of the Ministry, there's a secret witness to the Malfoy funeral, attending from the confines of a cubicle likely as cramped as Draco's as they intrude on his father's official farewell to the realm of flesh and breath. 

Draco hates himself as he realizes he's begun to think about work at _his father's funeral_ of all places, but puzzle pieces are beginning to slot themselves together in his brain and he can't do much more than sit back and let it happen. 

First: His mother's wand is tracked by a barely modified version of the Trace, which must be broken manually when the Ministry has deemed she's no longer a threat. 

Second: Pertinger has lost her magic. It's not even something actively tracked at St. Mungo's, given that magic levels fluctuate naturally with health and mood, but the utter absence of magic could not be ignored. 

Third—

There's an intersection of those two ideas dancing at the tip of his mind's tongue, but Draco can't quite spit it out. That, and his father's casket is fading from sight, the last of his mother's spellwork moving it to its final resting place in the catacombs. Draco shudders to think there's been a space for his corpse there since the moment he was born. 

Once the casket is truly gone, people begin to file out of the rows of seating in a slow march, and Draco goes to his mother to hold her hands because he thinks it's what he should do. Andromeda joins them, as well as Teddy Lupin, who astounds Draco with his height. He sees the boy rarely, and now Teddy is fifteen, taller than his grandmother and great-aunt both. Teddy doesn't have much to say, and Draco can't imagine he would either, if he were a teenager attending the funeral of a relative by marriage who'd had an indirect hand in the murder of both his parents. 

He realizes, once the manor has emptied, that Pansy and Blaise have left without saying goodbye, and Draco wants to sink into the flagstones outside and become one with the dirt beneath them. 

Narcissa doesn't stay the night. Just being in the manor, for her, is like being riddled with tiny daggers that grow in number with every corner she turns. That's what she says, in her melodramatic way. "But oh," she says, tapping at a door with her wand. "I've left all these doors locked. I'm sorry, Draco." The door she touched swings open just an inch. "I'll—" 

"I'd prefer them locked," Draco says delicately. He clasps his hands together over his waist, and the long petal sleeves of his formal robes whisper with his movement. 

"Oh." But she doesn't re-lock the door she's opened. An hour later, she's returned to Europe.

☾

Draco bursts into the Auror offices the next morning, bursting to find the brain he can pick to make that final connection he needs—only to find the place vacant.

Well, no, Williamson is still here, poking away at his paperwork, but Williamson doesn't do field work anymore. Which, by Draco's quick estimation, must be where everyone's gone. Brilliant. Bloody brilliant. 

Draco hurls his every scrap of relevant parchment onto his desk before going about the task of spreading them out in tactical arrangements. His mind is on fire with it. When the door bangs open behind him, Draco's whole body goes on alert, and he turns around just in time to nearly be trampled by a wave of Aurors in their regulation scarlet robes. He can't see Potter at the head of the pack as the man's already passed him and his cubicle, but Auror Larch bobs at the edge of the stream as it begins to disperse, trying to call out to Potter in the politest way he can without keeping his voice down. 

"Just a quick check-up—" Larch says, just before the edge of Potter's robe whisks after him into the office and the heavy wooden door slams in Larch's face. "Alright then!" 

Draco has no such reservations about something so trivial as a _door_. He's on his feet immediately, clutching the most important documents and scribbled notes as he stalks up to Potter's door and reaches for the door knob. 

"Oh, no, Head Auror Potter's not seeing anyone right now," Larch says, as if this is meant to stop Draco, who turns the knob regardless. "Mr. Malfoy, please!" 

"Alright Potter," Draco says as he throws the door shut behind him, "I've—" 

Potter looks up in shock, which is to say nothing of Draco's own. Blood spatters Potter's face and arms, a dried arterial spray dark enough to make itself seen on Auror robes. He'd been holding his head when Draco came in, and his hands still quiver. 

"Malfoy," Potter says, "you're still on bereavement leave for another few days—" 

"You're covered in _blood,"_ Draco blurts out, before he can think better of it, and he wish he had. 

Silence reigns for a few grueling minutes. 

"Go home, Mr. Malfoy," Potter says at last, and it deflates Draco like a needle to a balloon. "Finish your leave." 

"I don't need it," Draco snaps, holding up his bits of parchment that feel like so much rubbish in his hands now, but he's lost Potter's interest. "We have a case to solve, and I've made progress!" 

"We all grieve differently, but I ask that you not bring it to your work. Finish your leave, Mr. Malfoy." Potter's eyes are unfocused as he looks at his desk, his demeanor at once cold and disconnected. 

"I am not _grieving._ I am working. I believe I'm on the verge of making a connection that will break this case wide—" 

"Go home, Malfoy!" Potter booms, cutting across Draco's words easily. 

Larch finally cracks the door open, just wide enough to reach in and pull at Draco's elbow. "You've been asked to leave, sir," he whispers, and Draco wants nothing so badly as to push Auror Larch to the floor and give him a swift kick. 

"Fine," Draco sneers, "I'll leave." He yanks his arm away from the Larch's grasping fingers and hurries out toward the Auror office door, snatching up the contents of his desktop as he goes. 

Draco leaves the Ministry building, but he certainly doesn't go home. No, instead he heads out to make his own private investigations, because he knows anything else he tries to do right now will produce only failure and irritation. He's met with a lot of closed doors—no Auror authority means no answers, usually—but still he forges on, cursing under his breath between each stop. 

The orderly at St. Mungo's recognizes him. She remembers that she didn't much care for his apparent experiments with her patient's wellbeing, yes, but she also remembers him as a Ministry employee in some capacity, and she lets him see Pertinger one more time. 

Pertinger is no longer muttering under her breath or making phantom wand movements. She's alive and conscious, but her state is bordering on vegetative, and there's something strange about the air near her that feels like it's sucking away Draco's own breath. 

"To tell you the truth," the orderly confesses, "I'd noticed a dip in her magical levels beforehand, but I attributed it to her terrible health from the curse. That, and her magical levels didn't disappear overnight—they plummeted, yes, and it was so quick there was nothing we could even try, but they didn't just vanish." 

"Plummeted?" Draco studies Pertinger's drawn face, the valleys of her cheeks that hadn't been present in her personnel file photo. No amount of magical hydration and nutrition can substitute for a real meal. He wonders if his father had looked so shrunken as he approached death; his mother hadn't let him see the body, wanting him to remember his father hale and whole. He hadn't asked why she'd said _whole_. 

"As though someone had pulled a plug on a drain, yes," the orderly says, sighing. "And we couldn't find the plug _or_ the drain. Now she's a bonafide Squib." She presses her fingers to her mouth. "I shouldn't say that." 

Draco doesn't comment on her faux pas. He taps his chin, the better to control his wayward hands. "Are there other survivors on this ward?" 

"You can't see them," she says quickly. Draco is getting used to being denied by this point, which is frightening to consider. But he doesn't need to see them. 

"Did they lose their magic, too?" 

The orderly bites her lip, frowning. "Can I tell you that?" 

"I think you can," Draco says, with no actual clue as to the legalities of giving a Ministry contractor vague medical information. 

She looks around furtively, suspecting as Draco does that it's not quite above board, and says, "It's too soon to tell. They haven't been in as long as she has—they're all still trying to cast the curse on whoever catches their eye." 

Draco pulls a scrap of parchment from his bag, and fusses with the outer pocket until he's extracted a bedraggled self-inking quill to write his address on it. He presses it into her hand, even as she takes a step back. "Owl me," he says, low and urgent, "if they do. Or if they don't, and they—I just need to know if Pertinger's the only one." 

"I can't—" 

"I don't need medical records! I don't need any files at all! Please!" he says, squeezing her fingers around the parchment until it crumples. He's getting as pathetically adept at begging as he is at being denied. "I just need to know this simple thing." 

"Just this simple thing," she repeats to the floor, and finally accepts his parchment. 

Draco sweeps out before she can change her mind.

☾

Head Auror Potter's door is locked tight the next day, and Larch is enjoying a day to himself. Every one of Draco's fervent bouts of knocking go ignored, but he can hear the creaking, shuffling sounds of a human being working at a desk when he presses his ear to the door.

"I would leave off, if I were you," Williamson says without looking up. 

"I'm here to work," Draco snaps, raising his fist for another round of abusing his knuckles. "Not sit on my arse waiting for his lordship to remember we have a high-profile case to work." 

"Interesting words from a Malfoy," Williamson snorts, ruffling the front of his beard. "No, Malfoy, you're better off waiting for tomorrow. Potter will be in there all day, after yesterday. Your contract is the same price no matter how you go about solving the case, anyway, so why the rush?" 

"I'm not so callous I don't care about people dying." Draco wrings his hand, wishing he had something to put on the abraded skin of his knuckles. Or a quick spell to cast. "What do you mean, after yesterday?" He remembers Potter covered in blood, but— 

"Sometimes you win the case, but lose the fight," the old man says as he re-inks his quill with a few bobs of his hand. "The rest of us soldier on, but Potter always takes a day like this after one of those." Williamson shakes his head. "I don't know if—" A deep sigh. "Back to paperwork for this old man, eh? Go find something useful to do or take the day off, Malfoy. Don't you have another day's bereavement?" he adds, squinting at Draco. 

"Perhaps," Draco says, pressing his palms together at his waist to quell their fidgeting. Williamson is right, and it unnerves him that the quiet, mostly-retired old man in the corner opposite his is so on top of Draco's schedule. 

"Then off with you. Don't get the department in trouble." 

That'd be no way to earn himself future work with the ministry, true. Draco heads home with a heavy sigh, back to the echoing mausoleum that is Malfoy Manor. There's a moment where his hand lingers over parchment in the study, tempted to owl Pansy and invite her and Blaise over for a day of so-called bereavement—but he's not ready to be dressed down for his atrocious behavior at the funeral, no matter how much he deserves it. 

He cooks himself lunch, pores over a tome on the history of curses, eats his lunch leftovers for dinner, and switches to a book on magical theory and spell construction. He lights a fire in the sitting room hearth, struggling to read by its light even as he settles into its warmth. There's a more advanced book, somewhere in the library, that deals with magical cores and their coexistence with the human body, but before Draco can get up to look for it, he's succumbed to the warmth and semi-darkness of the room and the monotony of the words on the page, and fallen asleep. 

_The astronomy tower is taller every time. The old man is, by now, nothing but a blurred collection of remembered details; Draco can only look at one part of him at a time. The wizened hands clasped in pleading, one bony and liver-spotted, the other blackened, skeletal. Dark robes, glittering in the moonlight that washes away what little color there had been. Ragged breaths._

_A long nose, twice broken. Cracked lips, moving in the shape of entreaty. Blue eyes, dull with fatigue, piercing his dream self like a hundred daggers._

_Green light blasts from Draco's very fingertips. Dumbledore flies._

_And the astronomy tower grows like an enchanted beanstalk, the ground plummeting away until it can't be seen anymore, so that Dumbledore will fall for an eternity before he reaches it._

Draco awakes with a gasp, slick with cold sweat. The fire has since guttered, leaving the room dark and chilled, and he shudders. His spine aches from the ungainly angle at which his sleeping body sank into the armchair. 

The dream is, of course, inaccurate; Draco at seventeen, barely a man, could not cast the curse that stole Albus Dumbledore's life away. Not a coward for that, Dr. Fiddlewood has said, many times. Brave, she said, to value life enough to hesitate to take it. Human, she said as well, to hear Dumbledore's appeals to his better nature. 

He sets out for the grounds, swirling a cloak about his shoulders as he passes the coat hooks in the foyer. 

The grounds of Malfoy Manor had fallen into shameful disrepair before his mother's return for the funeral. With just a few waves of her wand, Narcissa had restored them to their splendor, but without her magic to sustain them, and with no staff to replace that magic, Draco has no doubt they will relapse into their overgrown, tumbledown state before too long. He keeps walking. 

The wards rumble gently as he passes through them, and he enters the fields surrounding the manor grounds. The plants here are tall, dotted with yellow canola flowers, and Draco lets his hands trail across their stems. The cultivated fields nearby grow much denser, so thick with flowers they look like a sea of gold, but here the plants' only owners are nature itself, and seed pods wobble and drop as Draco passes through. The sky is cloudless, bright with a moon that's nearly full. 

Which is how he spots the other figure in the field, some fifteen meters away. 

Draco drops low in an instant. Years of wandlessness has made him cautious. He has some talent for wandless magic, but with a Trace like his mother's on him as well, it's never been worth keeping it up. He keeps his eyes wide, watching the figure from between the tiny yellow petals and their much larger leaves. 

The figure has their back to Draco, and seems to be barely moving. A brown hand moves across the top of the flowers, stroking them gently as though they're one big leafy cat. The head—large, with shorn hair—is canted upward, as if its owner is looking at the moon. 

Draco's balance shifts, and he stumbles noisily in the canola stalks. The figure turns abruptly, the whites of their eyes shining and wet in the silver light from above. 

Potter. 

Draco bounces back up before he can think better of it. Then he forgets what he meant to say. 

Neither man says anything, the only sound the night breeze that gently bends the canola stalks as it passes. Potter looks small, surrounded by such large plant life, and lost. When he makes no move in any direction, Draco pushes through the canola to make his way over. After all, what else can he do? Find a different part of Wiltshire in which to be sad and lonely? Pretend he never saw Potter near his home? 

"What on earth are you doing here?" Draco asks as he approaches. 

Potter frowns, gazing into the center of a yellow flower as if he might find the answer there. "I—I didn't think I'd run into anyone." 

"Well, that's not an answer," Draco points out. "Do you often go for midnight jaunts in the neighborhoods of mortal enemies?" 

To Draco's surprise, Harry laughs, though the sound is gentle and the expression doesn't quite reach his eyes. "You know, I do, actually?" 

"You should have owled. I would have made tea." Draco doesn't know what he's saying. He thinks he might be joking. With Potter. 

It doesn't land, though. Potter's tiny smile fades, replaced with an exhaustion that seems to wash over him until he's underwater. "I'm sorry. I'll go." And he begins to turn. 

Draco should be happy to let Potter leave his ancestral lands, as it were. He should want nothing more than the solitude he had just been seeking, to have no more company than the sky and the plants and the tiny animals housed in both. But finding Potter wandering the canola fields feels like the discovery of a strange new magical creature, rare and fleeting. He reaches for Potter's wrist. 

Potter's wand is at his throat before he even understands why he's lost his balance. Both his arms have been jammed up behind his back, straining his shoulders painfully, and his weight is all against Potter's broad chest before he can shuffle his feet back under himself. Potter's breath comes hot and dangerous by his ear, and Draco finds his pulse is racing, a frightened rabbit heart threatening to explode. 

Just as quickly as he's been disarmed—so to speak, given he was never armed at all—Potter releases him, muttering apologies to the dirt as he backs away. Draco doesn't know how to stop him this time—he doubts a second attempt to touch Potter will go any better. 

"Could you not sleep either?" he asks Potter's retreating back, and hides his fluttering hands in the canola stalks. 

At that, Potter stops, and looks at Draco over his shoulder. 

"Nightmares?" Draco takes a step forward—just one. 

Potter looks up, his eyes flicking from side to side as though searching the stars for his answer. Draco nearly chuckles at the thought—he'd always heard Potter was rubbish at Divination. 

"Didn't even get that far," Potter says, wincing as though admitting to some petty crime. Draco takes another few steps closer, and Potter hasn't bolted yet. 

"Why come here?" That much he _is_ genuinely curious about; he doesn't have to make excuses to himself for asking about it. 

"Well." Potter fingers a flat, lattice-edged leaf. Draco approaches one more time, and now he's standing close enough to see the bags under Potter's eyes, though not so close he might be in grabbing range again. "I can't Apparate into your dungeons, but I can Apparate this close." 

_Cellars,_ Draco corrects mentally, though he thankfully has the wherewithal not to say it aloud. Potter looks up from the plant, and seems to find the next question in Draco's eyes. 

"I've been here before, you know. Out in the fields." Potter lets go of the leaf, and its stalk bounces softly with its release. "I like to come here on my own terms." 

"On your own terms," Draco echoes, frowning. 

"Not just here. Other places, too," Potter adds, as if worried Draco might feel too special. "It's, er..." He looks around. "It's beautiful here, though." Draco senses that wasn't what Potter was going to say. 

On his own terms. The _dungeons._ Potter is revisiting war sites in the dead of night. _Confronting_ them. 

"Thank you," Draco remembers to say, his tongue feeling thick in his mouth. Then he feels stupid—he has nothing to do with the beauty of these fields. If anything, his touch would probably ruin them. 

He doesn't know what to do with Potter if he's not being snide and cruel, or more newly, working through the case of Venari Virtute. Snide and cruel comes easily to him, as much as being craven and duplicitous. 

Dr. Fiddlewood has said he can become any person he likes, if he doesn't like who he is now. And Draco _hates_ who he's been. 

"Do—" He swallows, flicks his tongue against his upper lip. "Do you want to come inside?" 

Potter narrows his eyes and cants his head to one side, ever so slightly. "Inside the manor?" 

Stupid. Potter's not here for tea and biscuits, he's here to do some dramatic thing with his war memories. 

"No," Potter says, and Draco is surprised to hear _wryness_ in his voice, to see it spread across Potter's face in a little smirk. "But thank you." 

_The moon is magical,_ his mother had once told him. It pulls at the seas, makes men into beasts. It makes Draco feel soft and open, like he wants to reach for Potter's hands, Potter's heart. It makes the memory of their past feel distant, immaterial, as much as it feels all-consuming, huge with its importance. 

And in the moon's silvery light, Potter, too, looks soft and open. It makes his dark brown skin a midnight blue, glints off his golden glasses until they look like another star in the darkness, and he looks otherworldly. 

Those aren't the glasses he wears at the office. Draco suddenly realizes that Potter's head isn't shaved anymore, either, waves of thick black hair framing high cheekbones and a rounded jaw. 

"I keep having the same nightmare," Draco whispers, the words tumbling from his mouth unbidden. "But I feel safe out here." _Your hair!_ he wants to say, but he will not frighten off this unicorn that Potter's become. 

Potter doesn't say anything in return, but the silence that surrounds them feels companionable rather than cold. 

Cold. Draco doesn't realize how long he and Potter have been standing in this field until he shivers, despite his cloak—he'd only meant for a stroll, the movement of his body keeping him warmed up, and hadn't dressed warmly beneath the cloak. 

"You should go back inside," Potter says, gently. 

"There are strangers lurking in my fields," Draco murmurs. "I can hardly leave now." 

"Am I a stranger?" Potter muses. "I didn't think mortal enemies counted as strangers." 

Draco looks at Potter, and his loneliness is like a black hole inside him, pulling at his every fiber until it hurts. "What's the next step up from mortal enemies?" 

"Er, dead, I suppose," Potter says. He plucks a canola flower from amid its clustered brethren. 

"In the opposite direction." 

"Rivals?" 

"And after that?" 

"Friendly rivals, perhaps." 

"I've a friendly rival lurking in my fields, then." Draco looks away as soon as he's met with Potter's surprised expression. 

Then Potter is laughing, and it's real, booming from his lungs and crinkling his eyes. "Then I should leave your fields if you're ever to go home again, instead of catching your death of cold." Potter holds up the canola flower. "This is yours, I suppose. I oughtn't add _thief_ to my list of titles." 

Draco before the moonlight might have said Potter's been a thief many times over long before now. Draco now says nothing, especially as Potter holds the tiny yellow blossom out to him. He takes the flower with fingers that don't feel like his own. 

"Goodnight, friendly rival," Potter says as he steps away, and the crack of displaced air that follows his disappearance makes the canola stalks wave around where he'd stood. 

Despite the emptiness of the fields, Draco stands there a few minutes longer, rolling the short stem of the canola flower between his fingers. 

He puts the flower on his bedside table before falling into a blessedly dreamless sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a big shoutout to spacehubsands, Saphira and ThestralHouseofBlack for excellent alpha and beta reading, the britpicking channel, and everyone else in the drarry server who helped me out with this chapter—it was a group effort for sure!

_This is the other way the dream goes. The worn stonework of the Astronomy Tower grinds at his kneecaps, his dark robes flapping around his body like a broken sail in a storm. His hands are clasped in front of him, and these are not the hands that trembled too much to aim a wand in would-be murder. No, these are his hands in the here and now, bony and nicked with miscellaneous scars, creases beginning to set between his fingers. His mouth moves in a prayer, its meaning lost to his waking self, its sound torn away by the roar of icy winds._

_He looks up. It's never his younger self pointing the wand. In fact, it's never even just one person—instead he's faced with a nauseating patchwork of shifting features, condemning him with a garbled voice and words that don't exist. Snape. Bellatrix. The Dark Lord. Fenrir Greyback, sometimes. His father, always. The collective parts move out of sync, becoming more disjointed until he can't look at them anymore. The only motion their many forms agree upon is to finally cast the Killing Curse, piercing Draco's ribs and sending him over the parapet._

_He falls, interminably. He has never hit ground in this edition of his nightmare; instead he wakes up tangled in his sheets with hours till sunrise, slimy with flop sweat._

_Except this time his view of the unforgiving night sky is broken by canola stalks, lit by the moon that hadn't been there before._

_Draco's dream body sits up, clad in rumpled workwear and a cloak. The fields stretch out in an endless sweep of blossoms, just barely yellow in the silver light. No manor, no grounds, no nearby woods._

_Nothing at all in this field except himself, the canola flowers, and Harry Potter._

_Potter is radiant and blue, his thick curls framing a gentle smile. The moon makes a brilliant halo behind his head, simultaneously silver and gold, and he looks like some celestial demigod making his visit to a bountiful earth._

_Demigod Potter opens his mouth and leaves it ajar, as though he'd forgotten what he meant to say. The smile leaves his eyes._

_Draco stands. The canola tickles his ears, suddenly much taller than canola should be. He takes one step toward Potter._

There isn't anyone in the fields when Draco bursts through their edge, swimming through the canola stalks as if he has someone to look for. Of course there isn't anyone. 

He stands in the field until he can't feel his fingers.

☾

Dr. Fiddlewood holds court, as Draco calls it, in a converted flat over a bookstore in Islington. Her offices are unmarked except for a plaque etched with her name, deterring Muggles with boredom rather than charms. It's not that Dr. Fiddlewood has any negative feelings toward Muggles, given she herself has volunteered that she's half-blood, but she chooses to specialize in magical clients. There are some things, she says, that are dug in too deep for Mind Healers.

"Sometimes," she had said, in fact, "there are things inside us that are like fat ticks, half burrowed in, and brute force will only make matters worse. So we talk." 

"We talk?" Draco had said at the time, frowning. She had seemed to have lost her simile. 

"We talk," she had confirmed. "And we ease the tick out." 

Draco thought then that comparing his troubles to a measly tick seemed trivializing, but she hadn't really been wrong, in the end. Draco's tick was just particularly big, and strong, and stubborn, and perhaps even had some demonic quality giving it that extra dose of tenaciousness. He imagined his tick to have horns. 

"Court is in session," Draco says as he takes his usual seat in the small room that overlooks the street. "Hello, Doctor." 

Dr. Fiddlewood wrinkles her nose in place of a laugh. "Oughtn't I be a judge by now, with all these courtroom goings-on in my offices?" 

"Soon," Draco assures her. The chair is high backed, winged; in shape, it's something that might have fit into the manor, but there its sympathies with pure blood style end. The flowers on its rough-woven surface are endearingly hideous and busy, and its clawed wooden feet end not in the traditional dragon claws but in rats' paws. As a child, he would have sneered at it, just as his mother would have taught him; as an adult he finds it delightfully stupid and teeters every day on the edge of asking to buy it. The idea of Lucius Malfoy seeing a rat-pawed armchair teeming with daisies and other low class flora in the ancestral home—

"What?" 

"I asked how your last two weeks have been." Dr. Fiddlewood gives him a smirk, and only she can make a smirk seem warm and friendly, free from condescension. "As I do every time you sit in that chair across from me." 

Draco picks at one of the daisies on the chair arm under his human arm. "My father died." 

"I'm sorry to hear that." 

_I'm not,_ he wants to say. He physically bites his tongue. He should never say that. 

"I imagine," Dr. Fiddlewood says as she reaches for her tea, "that you might have some mixed feelings on the subject."

"And why do you imagine that?" he asks the daisy. 

"Oh, based on our past conversations, things like that," she says. She nods at Draco over the rim of her cup before taking a delicate sip. "And it's all over your face." 

"My face is like stone," Draco sniffs, knowing he hasn't been able to control his expressions or blushing in a lifetime of trying. His sixth year machinations had been, more than anything else, about keeping away from everyone. And even then, Potter had seen it in his face. 

Potter. His father's funeral should be the headline of this session, and still everything comes back to Potter. 

Draco talks, just as Dr. Fiddlewood had promised he would when they began. He tells her about the funeral. About saying nothing. About ditching his friends who had only come to support him. About his mother crying—and Dr. Fiddlewood already knows not to point out that people usually do cry at funerals, especially ones for their husbands. His mother is not _people_. 

"And she didn't stay the night?" Dr. Fiddlewood asks. 

"No, although she did try to open some doors up in the old place. I told her not to bother." Draco's tea is a deep, milkless orange, because he thinks milk dilutes a tea's natural cornucopia of flavors. He takes a long sip. 

"Do you ever think of leaving the manor?" 

"I couldn't sell it," Draco snorts as he sets his tea back on the table, only somewhat scandalized. 

"You don't have to sell it in order to find a new living space, do you? Perhaps one with no ghosts?" 

"We have no ghosts in the manor. The very idea," he says with another snort. "Can you imagine Abraxas Malfoy dragging his ectoplasmic arse after me in the hallway, hounding me to continue the family line?" 

"Forgive me," Dr. Fiddlewood says with another humorous scrunch of her nose. "It's a Muggle saying." 

"I suppose it means something philosophical coming from that lot." 

"You live alone in a giant house full of ghosts of horrible memories. War memories. Torture. An occupation. Living in terror." 

"And my childhood, with two loving parents," Draco counters. 

"And do those memories counterbalance the bad so much you couldn't do with a fresh start?" 

Draco has no retort for that. He wills himself not to be defensive with Dr. Fiddlewood, given he hardly pays her 30 Galleons a fortnight to rebuff her suggestions and keep secrets from her. 

"I don't know," he admits. Silence follows as the good doctor considers him. 

"Let's talk about work," she says at last, although Draco knows he can't have possibly escaped talking through more of his feelings about his late father. "At the ministry, right?" 

His time with the Auror's offices hasn't even been two weeks yet. His bereavement leave has finished, but just barely. "Yes," he says, a little later than he should. "Under Head Auror Potter, working on the Venari Virtute case." 

"I like how you say 'Head Auror Potter' as though you've never met him before," she says, leaning back with another smirk. Draco doesn't miss her quick scrawl on the notepad braced against her crossed legs. She uses Muggle pen and paper; she's said in the past she found quills and parchment cumbersome, and Draco often wonders if she isn't right. 

"He calls me Mr. Malfoy," he huffs, "so why oughtn't I? There's one of your blessed fresh starts." 

"It's only a fresh start if you've both left your shared past behind, and I promise I mean it kindly when I say I very much doubt either of you have." 

"Oh, be as unkind as you'd like. Merlin knows I—" 

_Deserve it,_ he'd been about to say, and he'd only meant it as a joke, really. But it's one of those things Dr. Fiddlewood doesn't like him to say, and he's in no mood for the detour about being kind and gentle with himself. About accurately assessing what it is he does and doesn't deserve based on his humanity, and not the past he regrets. He rubs at the back of his neck, taking in the flowers on the chair again. There are big, garish rhododendrons in with the daisies. 

"Draco." 

"Yes, Judge Fiddlewood." 

"Don't butter me up with false titles. Talk to me about work." 

"I don't want to, anymore." 

"You know I'll never push you where you don't want to go, Draco. And I think you do want to." 

His eyes flick up to meet hers. She's promised him again and again she's no great shakes at Legilimency, even if it wasn't a massive violation of her clients' trust and autonomy. Dr. Fiddlewood just _knows_ him, damn her. 

"I found Potter out in my fields," he says, which is almost what she asked for, and no doubt what she'd be more interested in hearing. "I think." 

"You think?" Scribble, scribble. 

He thinks of Potter in his dream, beatific and strange. The canola flower on his bedside table, though—that had still been there, the morning after, real and wilting. "He was there," Draco affirms. He's taking in the pattern on the area rug between them now, not for the first time. Peacocks. There are no more peacocks on the manor grounds in 2013. 

Draco does almost all the talking as he recounts each bizarre detail of his midnight encounter with Potter—his hair grown back, his smiling banter, his admission that he'd visited the fields in the past—and yet each short, calculated prompt or question from her pushes him to admit everything he'd promised himself he'd never say. 

There are plenty of things she already knows, too. She knows about his schoolboy obsession with Potter. She knows what that grew into, even as his family served a man dedicated to killing Potter. His crush on Harry Potter had bloomed into something carnivorous and ugly, and so he had pulled it like a weed, like all the other feelings too tumultuous to keep in the garden of his mind. 

"I had the dream again, too," he says, soft and quiet the way he gets when she's peeled back enough of him with her gentle prodding. "The second version. Without Dumbledore." 

She says nothing, waiting for him to continue. 

"It didn't—" He licks his lips and frowns. "It changed, and I saw Potter in the field again. In the dream, I mean, once I started falling." 

"What happened in the field?" 

"I don't even know if I know," he said with a gentle puff of air from his nostrils, not quite a snort or a sigh. "He—he was smiling, right up till the end when it looked like he wanted to say something. And I woke up when I tried to go to him." 

She takes a moment to write her notes, and Draco doesn't like how much she seems to be putting to paper. 

"Is that something you want in real life, perhaps?" she asks as she stops writing, though she keeps her pen at the ready. 

"What, to see Potter trespassing again?" Draco chuckles. 

"To go to him." 

That gets a loud, humorless guffaw out of him. "Go to Potter? Not hardly," he says, and he winces immediately after because he can hear the reflexivity in his voice, and if he can, so can she. She does look a bit smug. 

"Wanna give that one another go?" she asks. 

Draco grumbles wordlessly, wriggling a big to burrow deeper into the tacky armchair. "What is this, another jab at my emotional honesty?" But she doesn't answer, spotting his deflection easily. 

"Does it matter if I want to 'go to him,' however that translates in the real world? He's got friends. Loads of them. If he's hurting, it's not for me to do anything about it." There's a loose thread sticking out of a seam at the end of the arm of the chair, and he loops it through his fingers to try to snap it off. "My job is my literal, actual, contractually obligated job, for which I require Potter's cooperation but not his mental health." 

Dr. Fiddlewood taps her pen against her notepad twice. "Is that what I asked?" 

"I would have wanted it when I was—" Draco pauses, trying to pinpoint the certain time of his life he means. "Eighteen, perhaps. When I thought the end of the war meant a fresh start for everyone." 

"And now?" 

Potter smiling at him amid the flowers had been the first time he'd ever smiled at Draco, and he'd been transported back to his younger self, melting with how sorry he was, how much he wanted Potter to accept the new self he was trying to construct. 

And when Potter gave him that canola flower—well. He'd gone back even further, hadn't he? To a time split between his loyalty to his family and how much he wanted to be held and kissed by his most hated rival. What a stupid boy he'd been. 

"He gave me a flower," Draco murmurs, before he remembers that isn't an answer to Dr. Fiddlewood's question. 

But it seems to satisfy her, somehow. The session finishes out with her usual check ins on his breathing exercises and mindfulness, at which he certainly could do better. She asks if he's had any panic attacks, dissociative episodes. He'd felt detached the whole funeral, but certainly still both feet on the ground—no dissociation, no. An improvement since three months ago, when he'd begun therapy. 

He signs his name to pay her the owed 30 Galleons; Gringotts has made some forward progress since his father's time of heavy sacks of gold needing to be carried and passed around. He agrees to his next appointment in two weeks, same time and day as ever, and makes his exit. 

The truth of the matter is that even if Draco did want to "go to" Potter—and he does, desperately, despite having no idea how he might—there's no point of entry for him. It's not just that Potter has real friends. It's that Potter at the Ministry is entirely the same as he has been, which is to say a far cry from the curly headed man smiling under the moonlight. His hair is shorn, his words are clipped, and his face barely moves, with an expression so cold Draco might shiver under that gaze. 

Today, as Draco arrives after his appointment with Dr. Fiddlewood—he'd had his tardy arrival cleared beforehand for a "medical appointment," and Potter declined to ask for further details given he wasn't allowed to—Potter is sweeping toward him already. "There you are," he says. Draco wonders if he's forgotten the permission he himself had granted. "You're needed in interrogation." 

"We have a lead?" Draco asks as Potter turns on his heel in a neat, militaristic fashion, but receives no answer as he hurries to keep up. 

The young man sitting in Interrogation 1 is none other than Thaddeus Dendron, the very first known eyewitness to Venari Virtute's effects. But he doesn't look shifty, or angry, or frightened; he looks expectant. 

"Surely we're not interrogating a bystander," Draco says as he's led into the viewing room that looks through an enchanted one-way glass into the interrogation room. 

"Not an interrogation. An interview." Potter barely nods at him before leaving to reappear on the other side of the glass, and Draco has no time to ask why it's not being conducted in the Head Auror's office if privacy is needed. 

"Constant vigilance," Williamson says from the corner of the dim room, startling Draco. His voice is comically gruff when he says it, and a wry smile twists his weathered face. "All sorts of charms standard to an interrogation room that would take time to apply to an office, that's what our vaunted Head Auror is after." 

Draco looks at him blankly, and Williamson coughs. "If you were curious, is all," the elder man offers. 

"Just a bit of privacy for the witness, then?" Draco snorts. "Never mind the terrible atmosphere." 

Potter is the only person in the interrogation room with Dendron. He takes a seat with his back to the glass, shifted over just enough to give Draco a clear view of Dendron if he stands to one side of the window. Williamson stands beside Draco, arms crossed over his chest.

"Are you comfortable? Do you need anything to drink?" Potter asks. His tone is clinical, and just a little off putting, but Dendron simply shakes his head. 

"We're just going to comb through your story," Potter says, "see it we can't pick out any new details." 

"I've already had my memory reviewed by Pensieve, sir," Dendron says, a frown flashing across his face before he bows his head as if in apology for the frown. 

"Yes." Potter is curt, his shoulders a taut line curving up at their ends. "Just a review, as I said." 

"What's he up to?" Draco asks Williamson in a low voice, watching Williamson stroke his impressive beard. 

"Reckon we'll find out as he goes along, as per usual," Williamson huffs. "Strange, isn't it?" 

"What is?" Draco watches Potter begin a routine series of questions for Dendron with half an ear for Williamson. 

"Well, Potter wasn't anything like this when he was in school, was he?" 

Draco is startled away from listening to Dendron's interview. "Like what?" He knows full well _what_ , but he wants Williamson to be the one to say it. It makes perfect sense that a seasoned Auror like Williamson would observe his latest Head Auror, profile him as Aurors are wont to do. A disgraced school rival making the same observations—well, there are lots of words Draco might use to describe that, and none of them would be complimentary. 

Williamson snorts. "The man's like a plank of wood. Impassive, almost impossible to get through, but just as like to beat you about the head." He holds up his index and middle fingers. "Two moods, him. Hot and cold." Williamson nods at the ongoing interview. "Cold at the moment." 

"Cold most of the time," Draco chuckles darkly. 

"I only ran into Potter a few times, back in the day." Williamson's hand on his beard stills. "But he seemed like such a fiery lad to me. Not a boy who'd grow into that, certainly." He nods at the glass again. 

Draco glances through the window. Dendron looks smaller, somehow, as if he's a reincarnated turtle wondering where his shell's gone. Potter is leaning forward now, and the tautness of his shoulders has spread like a contagion to the rest of his body. "No, I suppose not," he says, turning back to Williamson. There doesn't seem to be a point in bringing Dendron back; everything he's said so far, in Draco's passive listening, lines up with the case files he read when he arrived. 

"I know that my heyday in the DMLE was—corrupt," Williamson says, as if admitting it to himself more than to Draco. "But sometimes it feels as though Potter's gone too far in the other direction, you know? Rigidity like his doesn't leave much room for corruption, but everything else is shut out, too." 

"You're a candid one," Draco says, almost laughing. "Did you criticize Shacklebolt like that?" 

"It's a critique, not a criticism," Williamson says, as if that changes anything. "And I'm too old to be anything but candid, Malfoy." 

"Even though I am who I am?" He doesn't mean to be so direct, but all this candidness is infectious. He crosses his arms like Williamson, but where Williamson's rangy muscles make the pose look confident and powerful, Draco knows it just makes him look guarded, which he is. 

"Sod who you are," Williamson says with a quick bark of laughter. "That sort of tosh is how your lot remembers fourteenth century feuds. I don't go in for all that rot." 

"Generous of you," Draco mutters. 

"Civil of me. Reasonable of me. Hardly generous. Just because I don't call you by your father's name doesn't mean I'm ready to pin awards to your robes." Williamson seems to chuckle at his own little joke. 

Draco shifts his weight from leg to leg. Williamson definitely observes too much; any closer to Christmas and Draco would buy him a blindfold as a helpful gift. "Is it really so bad, having a superior who sticks to the rules?" 

"A head who sticks to the rules is all well and good, but Potter's not a man you could have a pint with." 

When Potter laughs in moonlight, it dances off his teeth, and he makes jokes about being a thief when he plucks a flower from its stem. Draco wonders if he could pay someone to Obliviate that one single memory, if only so he could stop thinking about it with every pause of his mind. That Potter's probably a man you could have a pint with. Maybe not Draco, but certainly _people_ could. 

"It does no good for team cohesion when we come back from a win only for Potter to shut himself in his cavern of an office all day," Williamson continues, right past Draco's self-flagellating, moonlit thoughts. "I think you're a bit of a twit but I think you do Potter some good when you go crashing about the offices in a fit of self-righteousness, or barge past his door to say something posh about how you need his attention." 

"I do none of those things!" Draco snaps, even as he flashes back to yesterday when his quill broke and he couldn't find a single whole quill anywhere in the Auror offices. He'd gone on a characteristic rant about the sorry state the DMLE finances must be in if they couldn't afford so much as a few spare quills when lives were on the line. _Lives!_ he'd shouted for emphasis, before pulling out yet another drawer full of emptiness and disappointment. "And if I need Potter's attention, it's to the work I'm doing for—" 

"Potter!" Williamson suddenly isn't listening anymore, tearing past Draco for the door. Draco whirls to see, on the other side of the glass, a cowering Dendron before a Harry Potter on his feet, wand raised in a tight fist. Draco pelts after Williamson, only seconds behind him. 

"—no such thing as an innocent first witness!" Potter is shouting, even as Williamson barrels into Interrogation 1 with a roar, Draco in his wake. "You had contact with Sheila Tully—" 

"I sold her robes!" Dendron sobs. 

"Stand down, Potter!" Williamson bellows, his own wand pointed as he thrusts himself between Potter and Dendron. 

"Out of the way!" Potter bellows right back. He points his wand. 

"Malfoy!" Williamson barks. "Get Dendron out of here!" 

But Draco is too slow. The spell is already beginning spark at the end of Potter's wand, and Draco has yet to spring to action, rooted to the tile with panic. Williamson roars again, and does the work himself, bundling Dendron out of the room so quickly that by the time the scarlet bolt fires, Draco is the only person in the room with Potter. 

The walls are trembling. 

Potter turns his wild, lidless gaze on Draco, and Draco wants nothing more than to flee, a rabbit staring down a ravenous hawk. But Potter's chest vibrates with the short, arrhythmic breaths that flutter across his lips and flare his nostrils, and Draco knows. 

"Potter," Draco says, taking a careful step forward, and Potter huffs violently, as though a giant's pressed on his ribs to squeeze all the air out of him. 

"He's—he's hiding something," Potter rambles, eyes darting about the room, no less wide. "Dendron, he's—" 

"Potter." Draco reaches for Potter's wrists. He doesn't dare try to touch Potter's wand yet. Potter flinches when Draco's fingers graze his skin, and he looks up again, his eyes burning into Draco's. 

Those eyes are full of fear. Draco tries to think, under the pressure of them, what Dr. Fiddlewood would do. What had she done when Draco had broken down in her office, too dizzy to know anything but his own mortality? 

"I need," Draco begins, his voice as tremulous as the walls, "for you to focus on me, Potter. Focus on the—on the sound of my voice." Draco reminds himself that right now his voice is a neutral ground—he himself can't dwell on how much Potter must have hated his voice when they were children. 

He pulls Potter's free hand closer with both hands, releasing his wand hand; Potter shudders, but doesn't pull away. It's surreal, feeling the scattered callus of Potter's palm, the warmth of the softer skin of the back of his hand, the missing fingertip, the muscle and fat and sinew of a part of Potter's living body; Draco can feel dissociation at the edge of his consciousness, ready to take him away, and now he needs to focus, too. "Focus on this," he says to both Potter and himself, and starts rubbing slow, gentle circles with his thumb into the palm of Potter's hand. 

_You can be any kind of person you want to be, Draco,_ Dr. Fiddlewood said, the second time he saw her. _If you want to be someone who is kind, who helps people, then make those choices accordingly._ And when he'd started to protest—not that he didn't want that, but that he couldn't, he didn't know how to, he _couldn't_ , that piece of his humanity had never been installed, she'd interrupted, _Don't let yourself be a slave to notions of who you were, either yours or those of others. If you want to do good, then do it._

"Breathe," and there's a too long pause between this word and the next, "in time with these circles." For both of them, again. 

Potter takes long, juddering breaths, in time with Draco's circles, and Draco finds he matches them with his own, until the pair of them are breathing in sync. 

_You'll never stop being who you are, Draco. A person is born with their personality, and their upbringing builds around that core. But you can always choose how you interact with others. Your choices are your own._

When Potter locks eyes with Draco again, the fire of terror has guttered, never out but no longer roaring. 

"I need to get out of here," Potter says at last, his voice a weak croak. "I need—" 

"We'll take the lifts," Draco says, quickly. He starts to pull away, but Potter's other hand is suddenly gripping his wrist, a vice keeping him in place with such strength Draco nearly stumbles. He hasn't let go of his wand, either, and the wood of it feels like it's burning Draco's skin with its magic. He hasn't had this much contact with a wand since—well, since Potter had put this same wand to his throat, but not for fifteen years before that. 

"No." Potter's voice doesn't rise except in urgency, and Draco feels that prey animal flutter again. "Right now." 

He's going to Apparate, Draco suddenly realizes. Right in the Ministry, right in the DMLE offices, right through some of the strongest, most tightly layered wards in London. He's going to try, anyway. 

"Potter, don't you dare—!" Draco can't even find it in himself to be embarrassed by how his voice cracks. But it's too late, and the distantly familiar yank of being Side Alonged consumes him. 

Grass. Cool dirt beneath his hands as he tumbles from Potter's hold. Tall stalks. 

Sunlight, as Draco gets to his feet, pouring over a brilliant golden field. 

The manor is a distant blob. Draco sways for a moment, then looks for Potter, whom he finds as a thatch of messy black hair breaking up all the flowers. He's overtaken by a brief urge to run his fingers through that hair, then draws his hands over his face as if smoothing the clay of his emotions, and approaches Potter. 

Draco comes to a stop just a couple feet away from Potter's seated form, and Potter looks up, his face framed by blossoms that seem to illuminate his rich brown skin. He looks stunning in yellow. 

Potter says nothing, seeming to take in all of Draco, even as he squints slightly against the sun backlighting Draco. 

"Thank you," Potter says, at length. 

Draco doesn't know what to say. There's plenty running through his mind. That Potter had blasted through Ministry wards, that Draco could have been splinched. He wants to ask _why here?_ and _why bring me?_ Yet again, he wants to blurt out, _Your hair!_ But instead he sits by Potter, vanishing into the stalks with him. 

Potter puts his face into his hands, leaning forward until his elbows rest on his knees. He says nothing as well, the silence between them filled with birdsong, the daytime scurrying of bold small animals, the wind whistling along without any trees to slow it down. 

"I feel," Potter says, suddenly, "trapped inside myself." 

Draco feels as though he's listening to his own thoughts. 

"And I don't know how to get out," Draco whispers, as if to finish Potter's sentence. 

Potter sits back up, looking at Draco with eyes that flick gently over every part of him, before settling on his face. He frowns, rolling his lips between his teeth, then holds out his hand. His left hand. 

Draco regards the hand with suspicion, though he tries to keep it off his face. 

"Can you—can you do that thing again?" Potter asks. Draco finally sees that his hand is still trembling, though not as dramatically as at the ministry. 

So he does. He takes Potter's hand again, after scooting closer as precisely as he can to keep from mucking up his trousers. As he starts to rub those circles again, he feels just outside his own body, and does his best to gather himself back into his skin. 

"No one's ever really helped me through these—these episodes, before," Potter murmurs as Draco works, or whatever it is he's doing. 

"Don't you have friends?" Draco snorts, then bites his lip. "I mean—don't they..." 

Potter lets Draco's words sputter out into awkward quiet, watching Draco's thumb move. Then he says, "Did you ever think it would be you?" 

Draco looks up, startled. His vibrato heart climbs into his throat as he looks into Harry's eyes for the umpteenth time today, and this time they're soft, shining with something unidentifiable that frightens Draco. He doesn't know what Harry means but he knows what he _wishes_ it meant. 

All his feelings from sixth year and beyond have come sailing back, brought back by the wind of simply being around Potter regularly again. It shouldn't be like this. He's an _adult_ now. He has to have moved on, because he's been with other people, however short-lived those relationships were; he never thought of Potter then. Not really. 

Of course, it doesn't matter. He's a violent, unkind person who broke Potter's nose rather than confront his snarled feelings, and that's no basis for any kind of relationship, romantic or not. He's hurt Potter and his precious friends more times than he can count. 

_You were a child,_ Dr. Fiddlewood always reminds him, and he wants to let that justification wash away all his hideous feelings and self-loathing, but it just never sticks. 

He's taken too long to answer. Potter flushes, eyes half-lidded as he turns away. "Sorry, I—" 

"That it would be me, what?" Draco asks. He looks down at Potter's hand and changes the position of his own two, now drawing his circles with a lazy index finger as the other hand cradles Potter's. His heart is still in his throat, possibly never to come down. He supposes that's just where his heart lives, now. 

"To—I don't know. To help me. To be kind to me." 

"I'm hardly kind," Draco says, his voice suddenly harsh. 

"Of course you are." Draco glances up and sees Potter hiding a smirk behind his free hand. "Now you are, I mean." 

_Of course you are._ He says it so casually, as though he's not just thrown a rope of feeling around Draco and pulled it tight. For a moment Draco closes his eyes and swallows, because there's a lump growing in his throat. The older he gets, the easier it is to cry, he's found. On the back of his eyelids, he can picture Potter leaning in, telling him those magic words again, brushing his lips against Draco's. Now Draco has to open his eyes again or he'll keep seeing that forbidden image. 

Potter's hand slips from his grasp to reach up and thumb a tear from Draco's eye, and Draco gasps. 

"I'm sorry," Potter says, gathering his hands to himself and looking contrite. "I didn't mean—I'm sorry." 

Draco's mucking everything up. "Your hair," he says, despite keeping it to himself twice before now. 

"Oh," Harry says, with a gentle chuckle, and reaches up to push a hand through his thick hair. The right hand, with its scars across the knuckles, and the indelible words from fifth year. "It's—well, it's actually this. At work, I just... It's a charm I cast, but it gets—wobbly, sometimes." 

"Wobbly." Draco snorts. His hands open and clench in his lap, and he tucks them under his thighs to still them. "How do you cast a wobbly charm, Potter?" 

"By being me, I suppose," Potter says with another tug at his hair. His hairline doesn't seem to have moved at all since they were in school, drat him. Drat Lucius Malfoy and his genetics, may he rest in some modicum of peace, but not too much. "I did try to actually shave my hair off, you know. It just didn't take." 

"Why would you _ever?"_ Draco says with a sneer that involves sticking his tongue out. 

"Oh, do you like my hair, Malfoy?" Potter snickers. 

"No, it's horrible and unkempt," Draco sniffs, turning his face into the wind to hide the way he's blushing, as well as hoping the wind will cool his hot skin. "I'd die if I had your hair." 

"I'm sure you'd find some way to make it a posh new trend," Potter says. He's so damn _jovial_ out here, and while Draco has a ready retort about just how unfit for anything posh Potter's hair is—

"Why?" 

"Well, because you _are_ posh, and a peacock, and—" 

"No, I mean—" Draco groans in frustration, trying to find the right words. "You're made of stone at work. And you hide your hair. And call me Mr. Malfoy. And have nothing on your desk." 

The smile drops from Potter's face, and now Draco wishes he hadn't said anything. He doesn't want to be the person who stops Potter from smiling, not anymore. Not ever, really, even when he thought he did. 

"I don't know." Draco hadn't noticed the way Potter was comfortably spread out until now, when Potter draws back into himself, tucking all his limbs into each other until he's hugging his knees with his chin between them. "I'm tired of myself. I'm tired of feeling so much." 

Again, Draco feels as though the words have been borrowed from his own thoughts. "But you're not like that here." _With me,_ he doesn't add, because he doesn't want to be presumptuous. 

Potter hums a little, drumming his fingers on his shins. "You make it easy," he says, and suddenly Draco forgets how to breathe. 

"Don't puff me up. It won't get you anywhere," Draco says with a thick tongue and a voice that feels like it's coming from somewhere else. 

"You do, though. It's like—I dunno, it's hard to explain. You don't worry at me, even when you're helping me. You don't make me feel like I'm made of glass." 

"I believe we're here because you were having a particularly glass-like moment, Potter." 

Potter laughs. "Like that, see?" 

"So you remember how to laugh and smile around me because I mistreat you, is that it?" Draco winds a nervous hand through a knot of grass, tangling it further. "I should refer you to my therapist." 

"You have a therapist?" Potter's body is starting to come loose again as he leans over with curiosity. "Do you really?" 

Alarm spreads through Draco's chest, squeezing at his throat. "Do you think they're wondering about us back at the Ministry?" He doesn't even want to say it, could spend the rest of his life here in this field being soft with Potter, but it's too late. His mouth is a defense mechanism against his own self interests. 

Potter sighs, shrugging. "I'm sure they are." He begins to get to his feet. "Do you think you could stand another Side Along? This time with warning, I promise," he says with a sheepish chuckle. 

Draco gets up as well, and frowns at Potter. "Am I back to being Mr. Malfoy when we return?" 

Potter looks at him thoughtfully. "What would you rather be?" 

_Just Malfoy is fine. Just Malfoy is fine. Just Malfoy is fine._ He rehearses it mentally so many times in the split second before he says, "Draco." 

The grin that splits Harry's face is so boyish and genuine that Draco can feel tears pricking at his eyes again. "Only if I'm Harry, off the clock." 

"Oh, because you love lording your title over me, _Head Auror Potter,"_ Draco grumbles as he steps closer to Potter—Harry—for the Side Along. 

"It's been my dream to lord it over you ever since I met you, so yes," Harry says with another laugh. _Harry._ He can say _Harry_ now. Harry links arms with Draco, and Apparating feels so much smoother this time.

☾

Dendron receives a full apology from Harry, with Draco standing in the back of the office like some sort of overgrown talisman. Draco follows up with a visit to Honeyduke's, ordering an emotionally neutral, midpriced box of sweets to be sent to Dendron on Potter's behalf. The clerk seems skeptical at first, but Draco does his best impression of a secretary high on borrowed power—which he may as well be. Another skill his father would roll in his tomb to see Draco flaunting.

Harry receives a warning from the Ministry for his damage to the building wards; it's apparently the second of its kind he's received in his years of employ, which by Harry Potter standards seems pretty good, Draco thinks. 

There is no sudden change in Harry and Draco's work relationship—Harry is still as stoic and professional as ever, on the clock. Draco just doesn't feel like he's running into a wall of ice whenever he has to talk to Harry, anymore, and he toys with the idea of suggesting they go out for drinks. Just a glass of wine and some small plates, of course, nothing over the top that might betray his actual feelings. _Wouldn't that be awful,_ Draco mumbles to himself whenever he finds himself imagining Harry catching on. But he misses Harry's laugh. 

The owl from St. Mungo's arrives two days after the Dendron incident. Confirmation that more victims, surviving only through medical intervention, have lost their magic, in the same draining way as Pertinger had. 

And it clicks. 

"It all fits!" Draco says, pacing Harry's office with the door closed. "The victims aren't just losing their magic suddenly, it's being _drained._ And the incantation—'power hunt'. Power is being hunted, it's being _taken_." 

Harry frowns, rubbing his chin in thought. "How could a victim keep casting curses if their magic vanishes?" 

"I said it drains, it doesn't vanish." 

"I don't see the difference, frankly," Harry snorts, and Draco throws his arms up. 

"Regardless of your inability to make the distinction, _I_ have, and all that matters now is whether you agree with my theory." 

"It's unprecedented, if you're right," Harry says with a tapping finger on his jaw. "But we've no room to underestimate Dark magic. What do you propose?" 

"A _trace,_ " Draco says with fervor, planting both his hands on Harry's considerable desk. 

"Like the one on magical children?" 

"Like the one on me and my mother," Draco says, more or less agreeing. "But I don't want to put it on a person, precisely. I want to put it on someone's _magic."_

And Draco explains, until Harry understands, that if a person's magic is like a well full of water and the water is being drained, then he wants to drop a Trace spell right into that water, and let it follow the water along its new path. 

"With that," he says, pounding one fist into the flat of his other hand, "we should be led right to the source. The original curse caster." 

Harry stands, an intensity about him as he says, "Let's get to work, then." 

The problem, of course, is that Draco remains wandless. It is up to Harry to interpret Draco's theory and hand-flapping into actual casting and wand movement, and there's a disconnect between the two that makes Draco waspish, which in turn makes him embarrassed and apologetic. 

"We'll get it," Harry tries to reassure him, but he doesn't sound too sure, himself. It's been days, and there've been no breakthroughs on how to manipulate the Trace to transcend its usual surface touch—Harry made mention of getting dinged by the Ministry, just before second year, for a spell cast by Lucius's errant house elf. Working with the Trace as a base spell is working with a flawed foundation, but especially without a wand, Draco can see no other avenue for it. 

"Maybe a potion," he mutters one night, which is wearing long. The offices are empty except for himself and Harry, so he's migrated his work to Harry's desk, sitting in the Head Auror's chair while Harry continues to work on the practical end of the spell. Draco wonders, looking at him, if there's just something wrong with Draco's communication skills at their center. 

"Is there such a potion?" Harry asks with another aggressive flick of his wand, missing what Draco thinks is the grace of his own suggested wandwork. "Or, I dunno, a potion you can use as a base?" 

"I can't say I'm not rusty at potions," Draco sighs. "Being as big a swot as I've become doesn't leave much room for practical application." 

Harry laughs. "Did you just call yourself a swot?" 

Draco scowls in return. "Well, I am! It's my job! It's quite literally what your blessed Ministry is paying me for!" 

"I just think it's funny," Harry says with an extra chuckle. "I can't imagine Draco Malfoy, age 11, thinking he'd ever call himself that." 

"I'm sure Draco Malfoy, age 11, also thought he'd still have the same wand sold to him by Ollivander's," Draco replies with a grumble, turning his attention back to his work. That is, until he realizes that Harry's stopped moving in front of him. "Why did you stop?" 

"It's getting late, isn't it?" Harry says, as though he's just noticed. 

"I suppose if you want to go home I'd better pack up," Draco says, already beginning the process of tidying his bevy of parchments into a neat pile that might, with some effort, fit into his satchel. 

"Well—yes." Harry scratches at the back of his head. Since the last Auror went home, he's let his hair show again, thick and shiny. "I suppose you couldn't stay in here alone, given you don't have keys." 

"Thank you for reminding me of my temporary nature," Draco says dryly, starting to push his parchments into his bag with insistent shoves. 

"I didn't mean it that way," Harry says with an exhasperated drop of his arms, his hands clapping against his legs. "Do you want to come home with me?" 

Draco's hand slips as Harry says it, and all his parchment bursts from the top of the bag, scattering across one corner of the room. "Sorry?" Draco stammers. 

Harry claps a hand to his mouth, realizing his phrasing before he hurries to help pick up the runaway parchment. "I mean," he says as he gathers them into a sloppy stack, "do you want to keep working together in my house?" 

"Right, I knew that," Draco huffs, hiding behind an even bigger, sloppier stack. "I appreciate it, Head Auror Potter, but the manor is well-stocked with desks, and my work doesn't demand the sight of you wiggling your wand about in front of me—" He goes beetroot red behind his armful of parchment and he keeps it up like a fence. "I can work alone!" 

A hand peels down the top of the parchment, and Harry's face is on the other side. "I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important, Draco." 

Oh, Merlin. Merlin, Circe, Hecate, all of them, because there's no way Draco can say no to any of that. Not to Potter's plaintive face by the light of the office's hearth, and not to his firm insistence that it's important Draco follow him home, capped with the use of his first name. He's hopeless. 

Draco waits in the hallway just outside the Auror offices while Harry putters around inside, making sure everything is adequately locked up, all lights put out for the night, then waits some more while Harry locks up the offices' front door. They head to the lift together and meet no one, which means Draco has nowhere to look except resolutely, awkwardly ahead as he and Harry share a tiny space for the brief span of time it takes to make it to the top floor. 

"Twelve Grimmauld Place," Harry says as he steps through the Floo in the lobby. 

"Twelve—? Wait, that's my—" But Harry is gone, and Draco's only recourse is to take a pinch of powder and follow him. 

Twelve Grimmauld Place is nothing like he remembers it, and of course it isn't. Harry wouldn't hold with troll leg umbrella stands, mounted house elf heads, or any of the other Pureblood trappings his Great Aunt Walburga had so proudly displayed. Harry's version of the Black family home is warm, and somehow invitingly messy, nothing like the office he keeps at the Ministry. 

Well, actually, maybe it's just messy, Draco amends as he ventures deeper inside. Harry's home is warm because it's his, and because he's re-painted the walls in pleasing shades of gold, the big Gryffindor, but his home is chaotic past the entryway. It goes beyond "lived in," and as Harry leads Draco in, he seems to realize this. 

"I, uh, forgot to clean up, I wasn't expecting company," he says, as if the mess hasn't clearly become a fixture of the house, and as if he hadn't invited Draco himself. Draco's fingers twitch at the sight of it all; doesn't Harry know a single cleaning charm besides Scourgify? Even after all this time, given a wand, Draco bets he could have every item back in its place or in the bin where it belongs in no time, done and dusted. 

"Wait here," Harry says, once he's led Draco to a room that should, by his recollection, be the sitting room. There's exactly one seat available in the sitting room, and all else is under a collection of detritus and misplaced items. The irony isn't lost on him, and he snorts. 

"Look at yourself," Draco murmurs once Harry's out of the room. "Home alone with Harry Potter, because it's 'important.'" He very much doubts Harry meant for him to work anywhere in the house, now that he's here; he doubts even further that there's a single bare surface wide enough for him to work. "What would Mother think?" 

The wait is a bit longer than he expected, and by the time Harry returns with something hidden behind his back, Draco's gotten up to inspect the bookshelves without anything else to do. 

"What have you got for me, a bouquet?" Draco says with a smirk. If it _was_ a bouquet, he'd have to hurl himself from the nearest window. Or something. 

"Is that what you were hoping for?" Harry quips, but it's good-natured as he finally reveals what he's brought. A long, narrow wooden box. 

Draco's mouth goes dry. "Harry—" 

Harry opens it, and Draco recognizes its contents immediately. 

"I can't," Draco says, immediately, taking a step back. "It's a stipulation of my freedom. They'll send me to Azkaban." 

"You can," Harry says, taking that same step forward. "I promise." 

"You're Head Auror, not Minister for Magic!" Draco snaps. "Get _that_ bloody promotion, and then I'll touch any wand you like!" 

"I think you'll find I've got plenty of pull where I'm at," Harry says, with another step closer. "Enough to get the Trace waived for you until the end of the case." 

Draco's head is buzzing. "During office hours?" 

"During all hours," Harry corrects. "When I lobbied for you, I made sure it was understood you and I would be working late nights." 

All the energy floods from Draco's body and suddenly he's exhausted. He sits back down in the one available seat at the end of a crowded three-cushion sofa with a _whumpf_ , staring at the velvet-lined box in Harry's hands. "You kept it? All these years?" 

Harry has the presence of mind to look bashful. "There was a museum trying to get it from me for ages. The wand that defeated Voldemort, and all. And you weren't allowed a wand, nor were we, er, speaking, so..." He closes the distance between himself and Draco, and pushes the open box into Draco's hands. "Now it's yours again." 

_Ten inches. Hawthorn, reasonably pliant. Unicorn hair._ Few of Draco's childhood memories are so clear as the day he received his wand in Diagon Alley. It feels strange to his touch, the wood smooth and cold, and he hesitates to touch it again. 

He remembers, too, that Harry disarmed him; it was, by a number of twisting turns of events, the key to defeating the Dark Lord. He can still feel, when he flexes his hand, how it felt to have his wand wrenched from his grip. He'd felt so weak, so afraid, that it had been no feat at all for Harry to best him. 

When he looks up, Harry reaches for the wand, holding out his own. "I think you know what you have to do," Harry says. 

"I don't know if—" 

"It doesn't need to be anything flashy or big. Just do it." 

Swallowing, Draco accepts Harry's wand, and Harry steps back. Where the hawthorn wand is giving him the cold shoulder, this holly wand is bristly, a one-wizard wand if ever he's seen one, but he only needs it for the one spell. " _Expelliarmus,_ " Draco croaks, and with a mediocre gleam of scarlet light, the hawthorn wand drops from Harry's hand, and rolls across the rug to just before Draco's toes. 

He picks it up with shaking fingers, and it's as though he hadn't known he was dead all these years. It feels as though gentle sparks are filling him up, the wand welcoming him back with glee as it reconnects to his well of magic. 

" _Lumos,_ " he whispers, and the tip of the wand glows with strong, unwavering white light. 

Draco's crying. He's crying, and he can't stop it as he holds his glowing wand to his chest. Worse, Harry is gathering him up into his arms, the wand pressed between them, and now Draco is sobbing into Harry Potter's shoulder, uncontrollable and loud and uncouth. 

"I'm sorry," Harry says, close to Draco's ear. "I didn't think—" 

"Thank you," Draco murmurs, between hiccuping sobs, because he can't remember ever feeling so grateful. "Thank you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to everyone who's read, kudos'd, and commented so far; i've been having such a good time writing this fic and re-exploring third person, and it wouldn't be that without the readers who've enjoyed it this whole time. the whole of the fic is now taking shape and i believe i know how the rest of it will go, and how it will all end, BUT!! comments and input from readers have swayed me before so if you have thoughts, theories, what have you, fire away in the comments. just saying 👀


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you again to Saphira and spacehubsands for betaing this latest chapter! it feels a bit short to me at just under 5k but i've really got the whole fic planned out now, and hopefully y'all like this chapter

The third thing Draco does with his wand is to clean up Grimmauld Place. "I won't work in a sty," Draco says as he keeps track of his sorting and organizing spells like a conductor presiding over his orchestra. "Honestly, Harry, how do you live in this?" 

"Well, I walk by it, usually, and go straight to bed." Harry sits at the newly cleared kitchen table, blowing on a hot cup of tea held between both hands. 

"I can't wait to be horrified by your bedroom," Draco says, and just as he realizes he's said he can't wait to be in Harry's bedroom, a pile of paper that had been neatly cataloging itself by level of importance explodes into a crinkling flurry, like a bird being hit by a Bludger. "Oh, damn it all!" 

Harry laughs, and puts down his tea to help gather it up, but Draco waves him back with an irritable grunt. "It's alright to be rusty, you know," Harry says as he sits back down. "It's been fifteen years." 

"I'm not _rusty_." With a quick adjustment, the wayward pile restacks itself, and resumes its previous task. "These are complex tidying spells, and I'm doing just fine with them, thanks." Even parts of Harry's house that are already neat to the eye get the Draco Malfoy treatment, books queueing up politely to reshelve themselves alphabetically by author's surname. "What does Kreacher do all day?" 

"Oh. Kreacher passed a few years ago," Harry says, turning his tea cup this way and that on the saucer. "He was already very old when I inherited him." 

"I'm sorry," Draco says, reflexively. 

"I suppose he'd wail and moan to see the state of the house today." Harry looks at all his possessions levitating around the room, and chuckles. "Or the house yesterday, rather. How do you know all these tidying spells? Didn't you grow up with an army of house elves to scour that mansion of yours?" 

"It's a manor, and we had a few, yes," Draco says, smirking with satisfaction as the sofa is finally fully unearthed, "but I like things organized in my way." 

"Fair enough." Harry takes a loud slurp of his tea that sets Draco's teeth on edge, and he pushes down the urge to tell Harry it's a cup of Earl Grey, not a trough in a paddock. 

"I'm surprised Granger hasn't done something about all this muck before, to be honest," Draco says, as a way of keeping a lid on himself. Not that it's much better, he supposes, than telling Harry not to act like a farm animal. 

He's met with the sound of Harry's cup scraping the saucer as he turns it again. 

"She doesn't seem like the type to sit on her hands, I mean," Draco continues, wondering if he's just blundering further into faux pas and still unable to stop himself. "From—from what I remember. In school. When I was an awful prick and she rightfully slapped me." 

Harry bursts into surprised laughter, and Draco hazards a glance over his shoulder to see that Harry's laughs are sincere, bending him double in his chair. 

Draco pauses the more complex parts of his tidying, letting the rest run behind him as he comes to join Harry at the table. "Did you not make me any tea, Harry?" He loves to say the name. _Harry._ Harry doesn't seem to say Draco's name much in turn, but that has yet to bother Draco. 

"Oh, uh—" Harry pushes his cup over by the saucer. "You can have mine." 

"You put milk in it." Draco crinkles his nose in distaste. "Milk clouds the flavor profile." 

Harry laughs again. "You posh twat," he says, which sends a panicked shock down Draco's spine, but Harry doesn't seem to mean it maliciously, still chuckling as he rises from the table. "I'll make you a fresh cup, then, your Highness." 

"So what _does_ Granger think of your housekeeping, then?" Draco says, studying the abandoned cup of tea in front of him. He can see the smudge where Harry had put his mouth to it, and he considers the very teenage action of putting his lips to that same spot. An indirect kiss, he would have called it when he was thirteen and too frightened of himself for anything like a real kiss. 

"She doesn't have an opinion." Harry's voice is suddenly terse, and Draco's shoulders go tight. 

"Doesn't seem like her," Draco says, careful not to describe her any way that might get misconstrued. Loud, opinionated, perhaps a know-it-all. Harry definitely wouldn't like that last one coming from him. 

"And what do you know about what she's like?" The clank of the kettle onto the range is louder than it should be, and Draco twists in his seat to see Harry bristling at the stove. 

"I don't, really," Draco says quickly. "I just thought—" 

"She doesn't come over." Harry's hand seems stuck to the handle of the kettle as he glares at it. "Nor Ron." 

Draco doesn't think he should say anything, this time, and he twines his fingers together to keep them quiet. 

"I didn't mean..." Draco trails off, not even sure what it is he _did_ mean. "How long?" 

Harry finally pulls his hand from the kettle, and lights the fire beneath it with a wave of his hand. "A while." And then, "Five years." 

"Why?" His pulse quickens, unsure if he's allowed to ask, but it's too late. 

"Because I'm useless," Harry says with a dark chuckle. "Because they're getting on with their lives. Do you know they have children?" When Draco wisely doesn't respond, Harry continues, "I can't be around them. I can't—I can't ruin their lives." 

All Draco wants, in this moment, is to go to Harry. To wrap his arms around his waist from behind, pillow his head against his shoulder, let him know quietly with his body that he's not alone. He finds compromise in rising from the table to stand just next to Harry, close enough to touch but not touching yet. "You're not ruining my life," he says, almost a whisper. 

Harry looks at Draco with bright eyes. "What if I am?" 

"Then I'd be touched you cared enough to not want to," Draco says. "Don't I deserve a bit of life-ruining, anyhow?" 

_You can't keep focusing on what you deserve as punishment for your past,_ Dr. Fiddlewood's voice says in his head, and Draco looks down, steepling his hands and touching his fingertips together over and over. 

Harry seems to give it real thought, though. "I don't know," he says, with an honesty that stings. Then, "The Ministry seems to have done enough of that for you, don't you think?" 

Draco laughs, weakly. "I haven't served time in Azkaban, have I?" 

"Draco." 

He's made it about himself, when Harry had just opened up to him. What a clod he is. "You should see your friends, Harry. I'm sure they miss you." 

"I'm sure they're better off." Harry busies himself with pulling another cup down as the kettle starts the low notes of its trilling. 

"Are you actually sure?" Draco can't do Harry's wandless hand-waving, or these past fifteen years would have been much easier, but he manages a wordless flick of his wand to put the fire out. "Do I need to do a tidying spell for your social life, as well? You'll get sick of me in no time, you know." 

Harry snorts, pushing a tea tin across the counter toward Draco. "Take your pick." 

"Bagged tea." Draco sticks his tongue out. "Haven't you any loose?" 

"Posh," Harry says, with a hefty pause, "twat. No, I 'haven't any loose,' does my house look like I trot down to Whittard's to pick up my weekly kilo of English Breakfast?" 

"I'd turn you down flat if you offered me English Breakfast," Draco snorts. "Do you have no respect for my tastebuds?" 

"Unless you can break Gamp's Law and conjure your own snobbish cup of tea, this is what I've got to offer you," Harry says, giving the tin another quick nudge. "Take your pick, I said." 

"Fine," Draco sniffs, and plucks a packet of Darjeeling from the back of the tin. He brings it to his nose; it smells cheap, but drinkable. "And don't you dare put milk or sugar into it." 

"You're mad if you think you're not pouring your own cup." Harry saunters back to the kitchen table, to his cup of vaguely tea-flavored milk, as Draco suspects it to be. 

For a moment, Draco wonders if he ought to be offended. But he's reminded of Pansy, suddenly, and Blaise, and the way they express their affection for him in volleys of insults and other little bits of loving disrespect. "Harry," he says, trying to keep the wryness he feels off his face and out of his voice, "am I your friend?" 

Harry pauses, hands clasped behind his back, though not with the rigidity of his office persona. "I suppose I do like to make friends quickly," he says, and turns back to his tea. 

Draco spills a bit of boiling water over the side of his cup. 

Once a desk has been exhumed in the corner of the sitting room, the rest of the clutter banished for now to another room, Draco settles into working on the spell. After all, that's what he's supposed to have come to Grimmauld Place to do, not just to do all Harry's cleaning for him and nag him for neglecting his social life. Without having to direct someone else's wandwork, Draco's work rate speeds up considerably. Within a week, he can see the end in sight, he's _sure_ of it, and it's just about all he can talk about the next time he sees Dr. Fiddlewood. That, and his ongoing attempts to get Harry Potter to rejoin the world of people with friends. 

"You know, Harry," Draco says, during another round of working past office hours at Grimmauld Place, "maybe you're just out of practice being social, and that's why you won't invite your friends round to your nice clean house." Draco's got the whole place in order, now, and when he comes over to work and spots Harry do so much as kick off his shoes and leave them in the hallway, he sends the shoes flying to hit Harry in the back of his dense head. He's also seen Dr. Fiddlewood early this morning, so he's feeling particularly socially reckless, giddy with her list of things to try. 

"I'm socializing with you now, aren't I?" Harry says, putting a plate at Draco's elbow with a slapdash sandwich on it. 

"No, don't be stupid, these are work hours. You never socialize with me." He inspects the sandwich. "What kind of cheese is on this?" 

"I don't know, cheese? I'll take it away if you're going to be a snob about it." 

"Don't be so sensitive." Draco pulls the plate closer, then re-inks his quill. "Come to the manor for actual socialization. I'll feed you." 

"You want to work together at Malfoy Manor?" 

"No, you dolt." He writes another shorthand sentence on the sticking properties of the spell and their need for enhancement. "Come round for tea and chatting. We'll—what is it Americans say? Have a 'hang sesh'?" 

"You sound mad," Harry laughs, and then, "Wait. Chatting?" 

"Well," Draco says carefully, "you did say you like to make friends quickly. So how about Thursday?" 

"Thursday? As in this Thursday?" 

"Or Friday, if Thursday's too soon," Draco says quickly, laying his quill aside. "Friday? Thursday?" 

"Friday," Harry says. "Er—no, I mean, Thursday's fine. Yes, Thursday." 

"You're sure you wouldn't rather Friday?" 

"I can take a day off for Thursday." 

"Then we'll do Thursday." 

"Not Friday. Thursday." 

"Yes, Thursday." 

Draco wants to write down that Harry will be by on Thursday afternoon, but his planner is in his bag, and he's still so used to having to get up and physically grab things if he wants them that he doesn't think to Accio the whole lot. He'll remember, anyway. Friday. No, Thursday. 

Between Dr. Fiddlewood encouraging him to make plans with Harry, and his own previous words to Harry— _You should see your friends. I'm sure they miss you_ —he decides he, too, must be out of practice at socialization, as he so elegantly put it. He firecalls both Blaise and Pansy at once in the massive kitchen fireplace in the manor. Pansy picks up, her head appearing on one side of the fire. 

"Draco?" She looks at him with wary eyes. "What on earth could you want?" 

Draco winces; he deserves that. He takes a deep breath, and launches into practiced lines that he still can't manage to not stutter through. "Well, Pansy, I realize I've been a prat to you and my other friends this whole time because I've been so busy being stuffed up my own arse feeling sorry for myself that I couldn't see you were trying to help me or at least be decent to me, so—" He stops for breath. "Would you like to come over by the end of the week?" 

For a moment, Pansy looks astounded, then throws her head back to laugh uproariously. "How could I say no to that?" she asks, wiping away a tear of mirth. "Merlin's sweaty pants, that's one for the Pensieve. You looked as though you were about to pass out." 

"I'm being emotionally sensitive to others, leave me alone," Draco scowls. "Are you coming or not?" 

"You were supposed to infer that I was when I asked how I could possibly say no." Pansy is smirking, which coming from her is a relief. 

"And convince Blaise to come? He won't pick up my firecall." 

"You should invite Greg." 

"Greg is not emotionally sensitive. He can come some other time. This is an emotionally sensitive gathering." Draco shifts, the stonework of the kitchen floor uncomfortable beneath his knees. 

"If that's the criterion, then I'll just uninvite myself now," Pansy cackles. And when Draco gives her a pained look, she groans and rolls her eyes. "Alright, alright. I'll pester Blaise about it. But you should invite Greg next time. What day am I, or we, coming over?" 

Draco thinks back to his conversation with Harry. _Friday,_ he remembers Harry saying in a sure voice. "Come over Thursday," Draco says. "In the afternoon. I've got something to show you both, _and_ I'll feed you." 

Pansy's head blurs in the fire for a moment, and is replaced by Blaise's. "I've had much smoother invitations for a threesome, for the record," he says with a dry voice and dispassionate features, then _his_ head blurs and Pansy is back, looking rumpled and irritated. 

"He just _has_ to drop in his perfect quip," she grumbles. "Alright, Draco, we'll be there Thursday afternoon. Don't forget us, darling, you know your memory is shit." 

"I have perfect recall, fuck you," he says, and Pansy laughs one more time before they both end the call. 

Draco takes time off from the Ministry for both days, though he still plans to come in early and work until half past noon, giving him plenty of time to whip up a spread for his guests without losing too much headway on the Magic Tracer spell. For Pansy and Blaise, he's preparing madeleines and tea sandwiches to be served with a sparkling white, suitably casual for a lounging, snacking afternoon. For Harry, he'll choose something with a bit more body, though he hasn't settled on quite _what_ yet. (It doesn't escape him that this is, just about, the glass of wine and h'ordeuvres he'd almost invited Harry to before.) He has a feeling Harry is more a beer drinker than wine, though, and he regrets not inviting Greg, just a tiny bit; Greg might know about beer. 

Neither Pansy nor Blaise let their entrance to Malfoy Manor be awkward. They both greet Draco as if the way he'd abandoned them at the funeral had never happened, and let Draco lead them to the sitting room, where he's laid out the food and opened one of four bottles of wine. 

"Four entire bottles? What kind of afternoon are we having, Draco?" Pansy scoffs. 

"Only four bottles?" Blaise murmurs. His wand drops into his hand from up his sleeve, and with a quick twitch of it a fifth bottle appears. 

Draco takes both statements as approval. 

It's strangely easy to fall back in with them. Pansy boasts about how much everyone relies on her at her job at Witch Weekly, where she works in layout and design. Blaise complains about how many free products he receives, which sums up his line of work pretty well; companies pay him to wear, eat, and otherwise use their products where people can see, because he is beautiful, as well as the son of another notable beautiful person. Draco feels an abiding sense of affection for what strange and wonderful braggarts and layabouts he has for friends, and he lets them go on for a while before Pansy reminds him he had "something" to show them. 

Draco shows them his wand. When they react with mild horror, he explains that no, it's fine—Harry Potter has gotten the Trace taken off him for the time being. He can perform as much magic as he likes. And he shows them that, too. 

The reaction isn't quite what he'd hoped for. Pansy and Blaise watch his display quietly, and then Pansy says, "So you've been spending all your time with Potter?" 

And Blaise says, in quick succession, "You call Potter by his first name?" 

Draco scowls, putting his wand in his lap as he sits back down and picks up his glass again. "We're coworkers. You know this." 

Blaise puts a hand to his forehead, chuckling as he shakes his head. "You know we both remember _everything_ you confessed to us when we were at Hogwarts, don't you?" 

"This is not what I invited you here for, you know." He takes an irritable sip of his wine. "I wanted to apologize to both of you, not be interrogated for things I told you _under duress_ , and when I was _sixteen._ "

"Fifteen," Blaise corrects. 

"Twelve," Pansy says with a wicked grin that lights up her whole face. She swirls her wine, gripping the glass by the bowl like a Neanderthal with the stem hanging from between her middle and index fingers, Draco notes. He knows she knows better, which means she thinks holding her wine glass the wrong way is rebellious. "Oh, Draco, you were such a sensitive little boy, for all that you were such a turd." 

"This is making me not want to apologize to you anymore." 

"Don't lump me in with her." Blaise lifts his glass to his lips with elegance, his pinky gently lifting from the base. "You may apologize to me anytime, and constantly." 

"You're both awful," Draco snorts. "And if I was a turd, Pansy, you were a fart." 

"Still a step up," she sniffs. 

He sighs, and takes one more mouthful of wine before setting his glass back down on the table. "I've been a poor excuse for a friend to both of you. And to Greg," he adds, "but Greg doesn't appreciate late afternoon madeleines and wine, so I'll tell him later." 

Pansy sobers, looking into her wine glass. "I miss you, you know. _We_ miss you." 

"You were trying to be good to me at the funeral, and I ran from you." Draco rolls his wand gently between his fingers. "I'm sorry." 

"I'm not upset about that," Blaise says, his voice oddly light. "It was your father's funeral, Draco. I'm not such a parody of myself I can't make room for grief." 

_But I wasn't grieving._ "You're not upset?" Draco asks instead. 

"I am, but I'm not upset because you behaved like someone who'd just lost his father," Blaise snorts. He seems to regard his wine, then puts the glass on the table to trade it for a madeleine that he does not bite. "Draco, did you know I've started dating again?" 

The news is genuinely startling. "No, when was this?" 

"Six months ago." 

Blaise's words are a slap. Draco falters. "Six...?" 

"And it's Neville Longbottom." 

" _Longbottom?!"_ Draco is sincerely flabbergasted, and his wand nearly rolls off his lap as it falls from his fingers. "Blaise, I—" And he understands. "I'm so sorry." 

Now it's Blaise who sighs. "I just want you to be as interested in our lives as we are in yours, Draco, even when you're being uncharacteristically taciturn about it. I want to feel like we're well and truly friends again. I don't want you to be the charity case we check in on to make sure you haven't died yet." 

Draco's fingers feel strangely nerveless. "What a fuckwit I've been." 

"Oh, don't get all sackcloth and ashes about it," Pansy huffs. "Will you promise to stop being so woebegone and let us back into your tedious little life?" 

"I may entertain you with a few choice details, yes," Draco smirks over the rim of his wine glass as he takes it up again, though internally he's beaming. "Don't tell me you're dating, too, Pans." 

"Oh, please, as if I'd debase myself with something so awful as commitment." Pansy glances at Blaise. "You and Longbottom are lovely together, Blaise. Beauty and the Bore." 

"I am not boring." Blaise finally nibbles on his madeleine, clearly aware that Pansy had meant Neville and choosing to deflect it with an implied compliment to his beau. _Longbottom,_ of all people. What a wake up call. 

"What will my life be now, without panic attacks and a pathetic inability to speak to dear friends?" Draco scoffs. "What sort of wretch—" 

His ears prick to the scuff of an uninvited shoe against the floors outside, and his heart drops into his stomach, his skin cold. He knows, he _knows_ that if someone is in his house, it's not a Death Eater, it's not Fenrir Greyback, it's not bloody _Voldemort._ But his body doesn't get the message. 

"Draco?" Pansy asks with a frown. 

"Someone's here, I think," Blaise says, brushing crumbs from his lap as he rises. "Draco, did you invite a third guest?" 

"No," Draco rasps, breaths shallow. He grips his wand with tight, pale knuckles. "Stay here." And he rises. 

The corridor just outside the sitting room is bereft of intruders, and for a moment Draco wants more than anything to believe he imagined the sound. He's too keyed up, though, his body too insistent that he check the manor thoroughly until he finds the person who _must_ be here. 

"Draco, I really didn't hear anyone," Pansy says from the door of the sitting room, and Draco shushes her instantly—the intruder could make another sound while she so noisily offers her opinion. 

Blaise whispers something to Pansy, low enough that Draco doesn't make it out in his focused state. "We'll be here," Blaise says, and the pair of them withdraw. Draco shakes his head as if to reset himself, and steals down the long corridor and around the corner. 

"Harry?" 

The fear drains out of him, replaced with confusion. Harry stands just outside a barely-opened door, his back to Draco, his shoulders rigid. A few beats, and then Draco realizes—it's Thursday. He'd agreed to have Harry round on Thursday, not Friday. 

"I'm such a prat," Draco snorts, chuckling at himself half-heartedly. "I'm sorry, Harry, all that back and forth and I thought you were coming on Friday, so I had Blaise and Pansy—" 

"I should have known," Harry says, his back still facing Draco. 

"I know I need to use my planner," Draco admits, quiet and musing, "but I just cannot be bothered to pick it up half the time, and it seems so tedious." 

"I should have known!" Harry whirls on him, and Draco staggers back as an enraged Harry looms over him. "I should have _known_ you could never change!" 

"Harry, it was a scheduling error—" 

"Right, you didn't mean to schedule me for the same day you brought over your little Slytherin school friends so you could tell them _everything_ about me!" 

" _What?"_

"Got your jollies, have you? Having a laugh at crazy, wretched Potter and his panic attacks, and his—how did you put it?—pathetic inability to speak to friends?" Harry advances on him, and suddenly Draco feels small and brittle, a handful of twigs in the path of an oncoming windstorm. 

"I didn't—" 

"You're a miserable cockroach, do you know that? Fifteen years later, and you're _still_ using the pain of others to feel better about yourself! That's what's pathetic!" 

"I wasn't—" 

Harry taps the door beside him with his wand. "And you had this door open, too. Reliving the glory days, were you? Smug about escaping Azkaban?" Draco doesn't even realize which door it is until Harry is taking another sudden, massive step forward. Draco's heel catches on an imperfection in the grout and tumbles onto his arse, looking all the way up at Harry. His wand clatters against the floor, and Draco rushes to hold it again, drawing Harry's eyes to it. 

"You don't deserve this," Harry hisses, and he lunges for Draco's wand. 

Draco clutches his wand to his chest as he throws himself against the stone floor bodily, rolling away from Harry. "Harry, just listen to me!" he cries, but Harry is all gritted teeth and grabbing fingers. "It wasn't what you thought! I was talking about—" 

" _Accio Malfoy's wand!"_ Harry shouts, holding his hand out expectantly, and suddenly Draco's wand struggles in his grip, like a cat with its own ideas of where to go. 

"Harry! The tracer spell! Stop!" It's a desperate attempt, but Harry doesn't care enough about Draco's true motives to listen to his explanation; he might still be swayed by the case, so Draco has to try. 

"I can finish what you started," Harry says, "now that you've set the spell's foundations." 

"No," Draco moans, as the unsuccessful summoning charm on the wand fades and the wood stills. "Please, Harry, for the sake of the victims, let me finish the damn spell!" 

"It was a damn good trick, pretending to be kind." Harry shakes his head. "I won't fall for it again." 

Draco can't even protest. Kindness just isn't in him, and finally, Harry agrees. But the spell is important. "It's not a trick! I just want to finish the spell! If nothing else, it's in my damn contract—until the end of the case!" 

"You'll get your godforsaken money! You won't even have to come into the office anymore!" Harry holds his hand aloft again. " _Accio Malfoy's wand!"_

"NO!" This time his wand tears from his hands with a brutal tug, its polished surface hitting the palm of Harry's hand with a slap. Draco's hands follow it up as he surges off the floor, reaching for his wand, but Harry's hand answers in kind and meets Draco's chest in a violent shove. Draco is sent sprawling back to the floor in a heap, and he's humiliated to find tears stinging his eyes. 

"You won't ever get this back," Harry hisses, his fingers wrapped tight around the carved wood. 

"Get out, then!" Draco shouts right back, grinding his sleeve against his leaking eyes. "Get out of my bloody house!" 

"I can't believe I ever let you fool me into giving it to you in the first place." 

"I said get out! _Get out! Get out!"_ The words rip at his throat until it feels raw, but he doesn't care. Two pairs of running feet are pattering in the corridor just out of sight, and he can't be seen like this. Not by Harry _and_ his friends at the same time. "Get the fuck _out!"_

Harry turns to leave without another word, and for the second time in recent memory, Harry Potter has left Draco a sobbing, breathless mess.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you, as usual, to spacehubsands and Saphira for an excellent beta, and thank you to @donnarafiki for helping me to unstick a particularly sticky bit of dialogue! also as per usual i could not have done this without the britpicking channel in the server; i know i ask a lot of questions and here's hoping this fic proves they're worth it!

The chandelier was never re-hung, following Harry’s escape from Malfoy Manor. A reminder, Voldemort had said, of the failures of the Malfoy and Black bloodlines to serve him—a reminder to do better, to work harder to achieve the Dark Lord's ends. It has lain, shattered and askew, in the center of the drawing room growing furry with dust, and Draco has not seen it since the day his mother began locking rooms. 

This is the room Harry had stood near when he'd taken Draco's wand and his pride. _Reliving the glory days, were you?_ Harry had sneered. So quick to assume Draco was his enemy, after all. 

He doesn't know why he's standing in the drawing room again. He should have locked it as soon as Pansy and Blaise had helped him find his breath again, through the shakes and tunnel vision and the fear. They'd offered, too, to chase Potter down and tell him just what they thought of madmen who assaulted people in their own home, but—no. Harry is a fire he'd somehow stoked to an all-consuming blaze, and he's loathe to come near that heat again. 

_The glory days._

There are other rooms in this vast, echoing building he never wants to see again. It was the west green room where Fenrir Greyback had first pinned him to the wall, slavering in his ear and cackling at the scent of Draco's terror—so he'd told him, as if it was important Draco knew just what those dark guffaws were for. _A pity you're too old,_ Fenrir had said, that time. And again, and again, in different rooms all over the manor, never doing much more than trapping Draco with his weight and taunting him but always inciting the same fear. 

Dumbledore had looked as though he'd known, in those last moments of his life. 

Voldemort had evicted Lucius and Narcissa from the master chambers to take up his own residence there. Almost funny, now, to think of Lord Voldemort needing a shower to wash away his semi-human stink after a long day of terrorism and murder, a toilet where he might sit too long contemplating his next evil plot and rise with tingling legs. A bed where he might perform the very vulnerable action of sleep. A dresser within which to keep his ubiquitous hooded black robes, perhaps ordered in bulk by Wormtail, because he could not imagine Voldemort taking the time to place an order with Twilfitt's. A footman, Voldemort had said, to help him prepare for bed or for the day. Draco's job during the occupation. There was nothing untoward about his time in Voldemort's chambers that had once been his parents', but Draco vividly remembers buttoning and unbuttoning Voldemort's robes, feeling his strange heartbeat under icy skin; pulling those robes onto angular shoulders or pushing them off; he remembers the numbness of his fingers at the fastenings of He Who Must Not Be Named's trousers, of all things. They had fastened at both sides of his hips, and Draco had counted it as a tiny, tiny blessing. 

_The glory days._

Of course, the drawing room is still a prime center of horror. Here, by the abandoned hearth, is where Draco received the Dark Mark he had only very briefly wanted, along with the agony of the Mark being burned into his skin with caustic magic. There, not far from the door, is where Aunt Bellatrix had tortured Hermione Granger to incoherent tears. And somewhere in between is the spot where Snatchers had shown Draco the lumpy face of the boy he'd immediately known to be Harry Potter, and Draco had very poorly pretended otherwise. 

It was an act that had helped save him from Azkaban, painted as bravery from a frightened child, but to this day Draco knows he had been a cowardly young adult. 

The kettle shrieks back in the kitchen, and Draco pulls himself from his self-imposed torture to leave the drawing room. "What would Dr. Fiddlewood say?" he mutters to himself as he heads toward the stove, pulling the kettle from the heat as he flicks the burner off with a deft twist. But he struggles to think of just what she might tell him, hearing a replay of Harry's words again instead, calling him a manipulative cockroach. 

It has been three days since his fallout with Harry. As instructed, he hasn't gone into the DMLE offices. He also has not reached out to his friends again, despite having just promised them to be more communicative and less of a self-pitying bastard. He suspects he'll get an earful about that, if any of them ever speak to him again. Poor Greg never even heard from him. 

Draco pours the water for his tea, dropping in a sachet of truly fine Jeju Island green tea. The sachet is pre-charmed to adjust the water to an ideal brewing temperature; he would never dream of burning delicate green tea leaves. He focuses on small things like making sure his tea is perfect because otherwise he returns to idle thoughts like pouring the boiling water over his hands, or putting one of his favorite cooking knives somewhere in his body. These thoughts never alarm him, because they feel so distant, unaccompanied by sad or self-loathing thoughts—simple _what if?_ s he shakes off like gnats in a garden. 

More glory days come to him as he sits at the kitchen table, waiting the scant few moments it takes for his tea to brew to a rich, buttery flavor. It was at this table that he had first been accosted by the occupation's youngest member, a scowling girl with long flaxen hair and virtually no eyebrows on her square, strong-featured face. Griselda Yaxley, too young for Hogwarts but apparently not too young to be indoctrinated into a violent blood purity cult. 

_Everything is taking too long,_ she'd sneered, fiddling with a short steak knife and kicking her dangling feet, her legs still too short to reach the floor at ten years old. _All the Dark Lord cares about is how everything looks so he doesn't get anything done._

_You shouldn't say that._ He'd been so afraid just to be near her and her treasonous words. Didn't she realize she could put her father at risk, criticizing Voldemort? Not just his high position as a Death Eater, but his very life? _Someone might hear you._

_I'm not scared._ Her pale brown eyes had bored into him, her pupils tiny and angry. _I'm not pathetic like you. I bet if they let me, I could do everything so fast._

_You're ten._ Ten year olds always have thought, and always will think they can do everything, better and faster than anyone else. _You can't do anything._

_I can do more than you. And I would kill everyone. I would kill everyone so fast._ The knife spins between her hands, still small and chubby with the childishness that can't be found in her voice. _I wouldn't make people less powerful than me do all my work. I would just do it, because I'm strong._

He had, not for the first or last time in his life, pretended that his mother had been calling him, and left the table before Griselda Yaxley could frighten him any further. 

Here and now, though, he pulls the sachet of spent tea leaves from his cup of tea, setting it aside to deal with later, and stands to open the window to the barn owl pecking at the glass for entrance. The bird swoops in, and it takes the work of seconds for Draco to drop a few coins in its leg pouch while it drops the Daily Prophet on the table. He rummages for owl snacks in a drawer, and gives the owl a tiny palmful before sending it on its way. Then he turns toward the newspaper. 

Eight more dead by the effects of Venari Virtute. Most of them found before they could be taken in by St. Mungo's, where hydration and nutrition spells—and in some cases, magically induced comas—are keeping previous victims alive. One hospitalized person has succumbed to the curse despite the best efforts of Mungo's Healers. Not Pertinger, he notes with a touch of relief that instantly turns to guilt. More victims, allegedly cursed by the dead, have been taken into St. Mungo's expanding Curse Damage ward. 

Eight deaths lain at his feet. Eight deaths because of his slow spellwork. Eight families mourning because he's been too afraid and sad to approach Harry, to tell him that whether or not he's a manipulative cockroach, the spell needs finishing _fast_ , before more lives are lost. Harry won't be able to complete it on his own, not fast enough. 

If he goes to the Ministry now, Harry probably won't see him. So Draco will have to find a middleman. 

The trip is a little long, but he's already settling back into his Squib-like life of taking life at a leisurely, almost unwizardly pace. He summons the Knight Bus, taking his already queasy seat close to the front—the better to make his escape once it reaches Devon. He flees the bus as it bangs its way by Ottery St. Catchpole, and takes a moment to catch his breath, hands braced on his knees in a field. 

It takes him another twenty minutes to find the Burrow, a towering, haphazard building on the edge of town. It takes him another ten minutes after that to find his courage and knock on the bloody door. 

He doesn't think Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley will live here, given they are adults with their own children, but he remembers, between old memories of war intel and new memories of Harry telling gentle stories about half-summers at the Burrow, that the Weasley hive is often buzzing with visiting family members. That, and perhaps he can convince the Weasley seniors to tell him where he _could_ find their son and his wife. 

His knock instantly sets off a thunder of close-paced feet on the other side of the door, followed by a woman's voice shouting, "Hugo, no! Let Mummy answer the door!" 

The door is flung open, and Draco finds himself looking down at a very miniature brown-skinned Ron Weasley, staring him down with Hermione Granger's intelligent, calculating eyes. "Weasley residence, what do you ruddy well want?" the child wants to know, before two arms loop about his waist and hoist him off his feet. 

"Hugo!" Granger admonishes the child that is so clearly her son, as Hugo wiggles dramatically in her grasp. "Who taught you to speak—oh." 

"Dad talks like that all the time!" Hugo protests, not seeming to notice that his mother has gone speechless at the sight of their visitor. Hermione swallows, then frowns. 

"Malfoy," she says, carefully. "What can I do for you?" 

He feels stiff, and stupid, being eyed in much the same way Hugo had just done by Granger. Or Granger-Weasley, perhaps, or perhaps she's given up her maiden name to become yet another Weasley. He realizes Harry hadn't told him that, or any other detail in the same vein; Harry's friends in a recent context never came up much, when they talked. Draco clears his throat. "May I come inside?" 

She still looks suspicious, but takes one silent step back to allow him entry, putting Hugo down. Hugo races off into the house, shouting, "Dad! Dad! Some bloke's come calling for Mum!" 

Granger puts her face in one hand, grimacing, then shuts the door behind Draco. "Ron," she calls, rather more delicately than her son, "we have a visitor, can you gather up your son and put him somewhere?" 

"Oh, he's just my son now, is he?" a deep voice chuckles from around the corner. "Never seems to be your son when he's—ruddy hell," Weasley says as he catches sight of Draco. "Is this our visitor, Hermione?" 

_No, I'm just the latest hall decoration,_ Draco thinks acidly, but he quite literally bites his tongue, putting the tip of it between his eyeteeth. "I just wanted to ask the both of you a question," Draco says, folding his hands neatly in front of him, squeezing them into stillness. 

"Why don't we continue this in the kitchen?" Granger says, gesturing down the hall. Draco waits until they've both begun walking before following them, his nerves whistling as he looks around. Everything is sort of packed together and shabby, yet each oddment looks as though it was always meant to be where it is, crowding the Burrow with a warm sense of being thoroughly lived in. It is nothing like the manor. 

"You know," Weasley says as he takes his seat at the long kitchen table, "owls exist." 

"I didn't think this was your residence," Draco says, careful in his tone. 

"It's not." Granger kisses the forehead of another, taller child with a bushy mane of ginger curls, dismissing the girl from the kitchen with a few quiet words. "We just came for a visit, but Molly and Arthur are out right now." 

"So you expected to speak to my parents?" Weasley asks. When Granger approaches the table, he jumps back up, and pulls a chair out for his wife, who gives him a smile accompanied by a wrinkled nose. "And you thought they'd just tell you where we lived, so you could come bother us in our proper home rather than send an owl like anyone else?" 

"Ron," Granger says, but there's not much feeling behind it. 

"I just—I didn't know if you'd answer, or even look at the letter, if I owled." His hands are beginning to tingle from holding them together so tightly. "And what I have to ask is important." 

"Well," Weasley says, as he retakes his seat, "stranger things have happened, I suppose. Have at it, then, Malfoy." 

"When," Draco clears his throat again, "was the last time you spoke to Harry?" 

The tension that spikes through the room is sudden, so much thicker than the simple anxiety of sitting in the Weasley kitchen with the people who rightfully could not stand him when they were all children. "Why do you ask?" Granger says, leaning forward while Weasley pins Draco with a thoughtful look. 

_Because he won't listen to me now, and I need someone who can reach out to him, someone with a better chance than me._ "I need you to speak to him for me." 

Granger sighs. "Well, you've come all this way for nothing, then, because Harry hasn't spoken to us in years." 

"You call him Harry?" Weasley finally asks. 

"What do you mean, he hasn't spoken to you? I thought it was you who'd cut him out," Draco says, then registers Weasley's words. "Ah—Potter, is what I said—"

"Do you talk to Harry? Is he alright?" Granger is leaning forward again, her eyes glittering as she reaches for Draco's wrist. 

"Harry's made it clear he won't speak to us anymore," Weasley says, and then, more urgently, "If you can communicate with him, at all—" 

"That's what I came to _you_ for!" Draco cries, pulling his hands under the table, out of Granger's reach. "He won't talk to _me_ now, he had some kind of paranoid fit and shoved me to the floor in my own home!" 

Granger gasps, but Draco's point seems to go sailing over her head. "When was this? Recently? You spoke to him recently?" 

"Tell Harry we miss him," Weasley says. 

"Please ask him to at least owl us, even if it's just a single word on a scrap of parchment," Granger says. 

"We just want to see him." 

"We only want to know he's okay." 

"Does he look healthy?" 

"Has he said anything else about us?" 

"Molly and Arthur miss him so dreadfully." 

"Ginny thinks it's her fault, the daft girl." 

"Stop!" Draco says, and he's embarrassed to find that his breaths come quickly with panic. "I—I don't think he wants to hear from me." 

"You called him Harry," Granger says, softly. 

"I'm going to put the kettle on," Weasley says, sounding exhausted as he rises from the table. 

"Okay," Draco murmurs. "Thank you." 

"Please tell me what happened." Granger pulls his attention back, and she's leaning forward again, without the previous intensity this time. 

"Just let me finish making the tea I should have started as soon as Malfoy walked in," Weasley says. "And I call myself an Englishman." 

Draco elects to keep his tea opinions to himself as he smells the cheap mixed black tea wafting from the cup Weasley offers him. When he shudders at the taste of it, he mumbles something about being cold, despite the late spring weather outside. 

But he does as Granger asked. He tells Harry's friends about his split life between Head Auror Potter and just Harry, who until recently only ever seemed to surface when he was alone with Draco. He tells them about finding Harry mid-panic attack; he tells them about the episode that nearly took Thaddeus Dendron's head off, or so Ministry damage control said. He tells them about the canola fields. 

He doesn't tell them about Harry in his dreams. He certainly doesn't tell them he wants to hold Harry until all the fear and anger drains away permanently, especially because he knows he doesn't hold that kind of power. 

Through it all Granger and Weasley are apprehensive, listening intently to every detail Draco can give them. Granger asks questions that take Draco on meandering little side paths, and Weasley prompts them back to the main story when he's strayed too far. It becomes clear to Draco, if it wasn't before, that they had never cut Harry off. Harry's exile from their lives is self-imposed. _I don't want to ruin their lives,_ he'd said. He doesn't know how much his absence has done just that. 

Much the same way Draco already feels Harry's absence from his own life, just three days in. 

Then Draco explains, at last, that even if Harry hates him now, which he must, the spell still must be finished. The spell that will hopefully put an end to the Rabid Dog Curse. Granger asks intellectual, curious questions about his spellcraft and theory, and Weasley groans as he sets about cleaning up the empty tea cups instead. 

"I think," Granger says, as Weasley returns to the table, "that for all that we miss Harry so very terribly, you're the one who needs to talk to him." 

"You're his friends," Draco points out. "Not me." 

"You're his colleague," Weasley retorts. "Not us. We can't talk to him on your behalf about Ministry business." 

"Don't you both work in the Ministry?" Draco says, failing to keep desperation out of his voice. They glance at each other. 

"I don't," Hermione says. "And Ron works in Sports, he'll have no business talking Auror cases. It is, Malfoy, quite literally your job to speak to Harry about this." 

"He said I oughtn't come into the office anymore," Draco says, aware he's whining. 

"Bugger that. You've never listened to anyone a day in your life, have you?" Weasley snorts. 

"I have," Draco sniffs, but he's reminded strongly of Williamson telling him his "self-righteous crashing about" was good for Harry. 

"If lives are at stake, Harry won't shut you out. Even if he's all wrapped up in himself." Draco doesn't realize he's let his hands rest on the table again until Granger pats one of them awkwardly. 

"I would say we're in strange times," Weasley says, "but we've lived through stranger, haven't we, mate?" And his eyes crinkle as he spares a smile for Draco. Draco swallows painfully. 

"I know that in school I was a prat," he says, taking himself by surprise. "More than a prat. I was a bigot. I was a narrow-minded idiot. I was a pig." 

"Yeah," Weasley says with a shrug. "You were." 

Draco's mouth feels drier with every passing second. "I just wanted to say thank you for inviting me into your home. Or your parents' home. Thank you for listening to me. I know I don't deserve your kindness, being who I was—" 

"Enough." Weasley puts his massive hand over the one Granger hadn't patted. "Leave the self-flagellation for the page, will you? I promise I'll buy your book when it comes out." 

"What?" 

"What Ron means," Granger says, and Draco whips his head to look at her, "is that while the apology is very, _very_ appreciated," and she fixes her husband with a brief, hard look, "we don't need the unabridged version. What we need is for you to go to Harry." 

"Please," Weasley adds. 

"And let him know how much we still love him, and want him back in our lives, warts and all." 

"You don't think he's dangerous? To your children?" Draco asks before he can stop himself, and Weasley gives him a dark look. 

"Of course not. He's Uncle Harry. He'd never hurt Rose or Hugo." 

"He does need help," Granger admits, and Weasley shoots her a look of betrayal that she shrugs off. "But he's not going to get that help if he just shuts us all out. And I want him to know Rose and Hugo." 

Weasley nods, apparently agreeing despite himself. "Tell him that, will you, Malfoy? My wife's always right." 

"You don't need to tell him that last part, Harry should already know I'm always right," Granger snickers, before sobering again. "Please, Malfoy. Draco. Go to Harry. At least to finish the spell; then perhaps you'll have a way in for us." 

They don't know what they're asking of him. They're war heroes, and staunch Gryffindors, besides. They probably don't see Draco approaching Harry as a brave thing to do, so much as a simple act of strategy that just needs to be carried out. 

"Alright," he whispers, and reaches for his empty cup because his mouth is arid. 

Granger and Weasley send Draco off with polite farewells, and then Hugo reappears to punch Draco in the right arsecheek as his own idea of a farewell, much to the shock of every adult present. "Stay away from my mum!" Hugo shouts as a guffawing Weasley drags him away, and Granger apologizes with a flushed face. Draco rubs the sore spot with a wince, but assures Granger he's suffered worse than a five year old socking him in the behind, both physically and in terms of his dignity; he tentatively reminds her of the time he was turned into a ferret by a supposed member of Hogwarts staff. 

"Right, then," Granger says with one last embarrassed chuckle. "Goodbye, before something else ridiculous happens." 

If he's going to confront Harry about something work related, he ought to go to the Ministry, he muses on his Knight Bus trip back to Swindon. Perhaps enough eyes on him will keep him as Head Auror Potter, cold but amenable to whatever will make the job easier. He'll go tomorrow, first thing in the morning, and with any luck Harry won't have had him banned from the building. He'll march into the Auror offices, kick down Harry's door, and tell him with no room for questions or arguments that he _will_ have his wand back, he _will_ be finishing up the spell he began, he _will_ be doing it in record time, and he _will_ save lives, whether Harry is in the mood for him or not. Perhaps Williamson will burst in behind him, to add... something, Draco's not actually sure what. He could go either way, really. He frowns as he glances out the window. 

He's missed Swindon entirely. 

And he realizes, as the bus lurches on, that he'd already known he was headed for London. Worse, he'd already known the Ministry wouldn't be where he'd force Harry to cope with his presence under professional pretenses. No, he'd known where he was going all along, fooling himself into thinking otherwise until it was too late. 

Draco steps off the bus, which has deposited him right in front of Twelve Grimmauld Place. He breathes. He climbs the steps, feeling as though he's scaling a mountain. 

He knocks. 

"Harry," he calls. "Please." 

There is no answer, not to his first bout of knocking, nor the second, nor the third much more raucous round. His knuckles feel raw. He lifts his fist for a fourth time, this time opting to pound on the door with the meaty side of his fist. "Harry!" Draco calls again. 

The door opens, just a crack, right before he manages to strike it. "Harry?" Draco says, voice straining. 

No response, still. But the door has opened, which has to mean _something_. Draco brushes the doorknob with nervous fingertips, waiting for it to burn him, or curse him, but nothing happens, and he shoulders his way inside. 

Darkness enfolds the interior of the house, none of the lamps lit as the sun sets outside; Draco lights the one by the door. What he discovers is that nothing is as he left it, a fresh mess lining the walls and floors of the proud townhouse. Broken objects mix in with rumpled clothes and linens; Draco finds one of Harry's shoes, but not its mate. "Harry, where are you?" Draco says, projecting his voice as he reaches to light each lamp he comes across. 

Would that Kreacher were still alive to give him some sort of status update on Harry, Draco thinks grimly. Although any house elf worth their tea towel would never let the house get in this state, he's quite sure. He picks his way through the wreckage, calling for Harry in every room on the first floor. The stairs make the only path clear enough to walk, though Draco has to leap over a particularly thick mound of mess at their bottom. 

Draco finds Harry, at last, in one of the upstairs bedrooms. The curtains are pulled shut and no lamps are lit, but when Draco throws open the door, the light from the landing paints a bright yellow stripe across the bed within, where Harry's huddled form lies with his back to the door. 

Guilt chokes Draco. How long has Harry been like this? 

"Harry," he whispers, and takes one step into the room. The floor creaks loudly beneath his foot. 

Harry sits up and turns around all in one instant, wand pointing at Draco as he stares at him with wide eyes. Draco's seen that look before. In Interrogation 1, and in the halls of Malfoy Manor. 

But Harry does not, as Draco feared he would, instantly hex him, or even scowl at the sight of him. Harry's breathing comes ragged, full of the fear that paints itself starkly across his features, and his wand follows Draco as Draco takes a few more steps into the room. 

"I'm not armed, you know that," Draco says, holding up his hands. "You took my wand, remember?" 

Harry gulps between the gasps he's passing off as breathing, but his wand doesn't lower. 

"I know you don't want to see me. I know I'm a manipulative cockroach." Draco keeps his hands up as he takes ever slower steps closer to Harry, walking in a loose spiral toward the bed. "But I need to know how long you've been in here." 

Draco has a short list of expectations for how this will go. Hexed into oblivion, shouted out of the house, dismissed with a weary sigh for being the man who goes where he's not wanted; all of these are on the list. Perhaps, too, Harry will calm down, listen quietly to Draco tell him the spell needs finishing, and agree to give him his wand back to that end. That's Draco's best case scenario. 

Nowhere on that list is Harry bursting into tears, and yet that's exactly what Draco is confronted with. 

Harry drops his wand as he buries his face in his hands, and Draco rushes to pick it up, putting it on the dresser behind him without ever taking his eyes off the other man. "I don't doubt you want me to go," Draco says, quieter yet, "but I can't leave yet." 

It's not that Harry is sobbing and wailing into his hands; his tears are quiet, punctuated by his shuddering shoulders and the odd hiccup. Draco drops to one knee just in front of Harry, heart thrumming as he reaches for his wrists. And Harry lets him, his hands falling away from his crumpled face as though they've become too heavy to hold up. "I'm sorry," Harry whispers, shuddering again. 

He doesn't know what to do. None of Dr. Fiddlewood's advice, what little he can recall right now, seems to apply here. Draco takes one of Harry's hands, watching his face for disapproval the entire while, and does the only thing he _can_ think of, rubbing slow circles into Harry's palm with his thumb. 

Harry's breathing slows, evens out to the rhythm of Draco's circles; Draco finds himself doing the same. For several minutes, neither of them speak, both focused on Harry's hand. 

"I saw Granger and Weasley," Draco says, and for all that he doesn't raise his voice, his words sound piercingly loud in the quiet of the house. "They miss you, you know." 

Harry flinches. 

"They told me a few other things, as a matter of fact," Draco continues. His thumb is getting tired, so he switches to his index finger, holding Harry's hand with just one of his own. "They never cut you off." 

"I never said they did. I only said they don't come over." 

"Because you made them feel they can't." It's a statement, and the only thing that keeps it from being a shout is Draco grinding his teeth. " _You_ cut them off, and now look at you, stuck with me for emotional support. No wonder you continue to be a mess." 

"I did it for their sake!" Harry tears his hand out of Draco's grip, and just like that, there are no more calming circles. "How can I be around them—around their _children_ —when I can't—I can't even—" His sentence ends in a frustrated grunt, and he rises from the bed so abruptly that Draco falls back in a tangle of his own legs. "I can't even come over for bloody tea and biscuits without abusing the only person brave enough to be close to me these days!" 

"It was more a wine and h'ordeuvres situation," Draco murmurs at the floorboards, gathering himself to get back to his feet. He can't even begin to address the rest of what Harry's said, between being called _brave_ and being Harry's _only person_. 

Suddenly, Harry's hands are wrapping around the backs of Draco's upper arms, and Draco doesn't get to talk to the floor or look into nothing anymore. He's faced with Harry's burning green eyes, the determined set of his full mouth, the way his jaw flexes with an emotion Draco is frightened to pinpoint. 

Then Harry lets go, everything in his face softening. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Draco. I can't even apologize without scaring someone." 

"Oh, don't do _that,_ " Draco snaps, and he reaches for Harry in turn. "Grab me, then. Look me in my soggy teabag eyes. Stop holding yourself back." 

"Soggy—?" Harry frowns with surprise for a moment, then laughs. 

"Like this." Draco mimics Harry's grip on his arms, and makes a face he knows is a ridiculous impression of Harry's intense stare. Then, with a deep voice, he says, "I'm sorry, Draco, for getting handsy with you and then going into hiding over it." 

Harry laughs again, softer this time, and pushes the heel of his hand against the far corner of one of his eyes. "I suppose you've got to teach me how to be myself, then, since I've so clearly forgotten." 

"Clearly." Draco flexes his fingers, wondering if he's hung on too long. Probably. He withdraws his hands. 

"I don't know what 'myself' is, anymore," Harry admits, biting his lip. "I feel like—like I only exist in extremes, and none of them are the 'myself' I remember, or want to be." 

"I mean, if you wanted me to pick for you, I'd pick the Harry who sat in the fields with me," Draco says, shifting from foot to foot as his hands flutter against each other as he keeps his eyes trained somewhere in the vicinity of Harry's knees. "Or the Harry who told me I couldn't have loose tea and called me a... what was it?" 

"Posh twat?" Harry supplies. 

"Yes, that. Both those are a Harry I'd choose." 

Harry drops to sit heavily on the edge of the bed, hands loosely knit together between his knees. His curls look oily and stiff, and Draco wonders again how long Harry has been lying on this bed. He has a sudden vision of running Harry a bath, of pulling his clothes off, of sitting by the edge of the tub to lather Harry's hair himself, and he nearly slaps himself. Harry doesn't need _any_ of that. So he sits by Harry instead, and is frozen yet again under the weighty gaze of Harry's eyes. 

"I really am sorry," Harry murmurs. "You didn't deserve what I did. What I said. I didn't—I didn't mean any of it." 

"I'd rather not talk of what I deserve," Draco says with a wince, looking at his knees. Between the closeness of Harry, the dark room, the lingering images of imagining what it would be like to undress Harry, he doesn't feel quite aligned with his own body. "But you shouldn't worry about it anymore. I'm only—" He licks his suddenly dry lips, sparing a thought for how dehydrated he must be lately. "You're alright, and you don't hate me, and that's all that matters." He misaligns even harder, feeling thoroughly disengaged from his physical form. His eyes feel crossed. 

"Draco." A hand is covering his. Harry's hand, hot and rough and missing the tip of its pinky. Harry's hand, turning Draco's over; Harry's thumb, tracing slow circles into the dip of Draco's palm. "Look at me." Harry's other hand, finding a place on Draco's jaw to turn his head in Harry's direction, and Draco might as well burst into flame at the touch. 

"Your friends need you," Draco croaks, before Harry can say something that will kill him on the spot. "They miss you." 

Harry frowns, his hand falling from Draco's face to join its partner in holding Draco's hand. His hand becomes the focal point of all of Draco's senses for a moment, mapping the exact places where Harry's fingers are wrapped around him. The track his thumb runs, dragging and catching against the grain of Draco's skin. Harry looks toward the window and its drawn curtains. 

"I miss them, too," Harry says. He squeezes Draco's hand. "And you. I've missed you." 

"You've missed my cleaning," Draco retorts, with an attempt at a tiny smile that falls within seconds. "This place is a disaster." 

"I don't know how you've done it, Draco Malfoy," Harry says, and Merlin, he's so close, he's leaning in and Draco knows it must be because his voice is so quiet, he just wants Draco to hear, but he can _feel_ the heat radiating from Harry's body, from his face. "But you—you've helped me, more than you even seem to know. I never feel like I have a _me_ to be, anymore, except when I'm with you." Harry is lifting his hand, pressing the back of it to his chest, and Draco's heart might explode, beating hard and fast and surging against his ribs. "You ground me." 

Draco's vision blurs, and he can't figure out why until he feels the first tear sliding down his face. "I don't," he says, the words riding a shaky breath. "It's not true." 

"Don't say that." Harry is looking at him again, and Draco can feel Harry's breaths puffing against his lips. "I want to help you the way you've helped me." Draco pinches his eyes shut. "Draco. Please." 

Strong arms pull Draco in, and Harry is embracing him, crushing Draco's skinny frame to his own. Despite every self-loathing thought in his head, Draco returns it, his fingers clutching at the back of Harry's shirt as if for dear life. He doesn't understand how he came here to rescue Harry and yet here he is, crying into Harry's shoulder as Harry rocks him back and forth, feeling Harry's heartbeat against his own. 

It feels like a long time before Draco runs dry, simply relaxing into Harry's touch. He wants to lie down in this feeling, sleep forever with Harry's arms around him. Draco runs his hands down Harry's back, feeling the strength of his body, the warmth of his skin through his pilled cotton T-shirt, and he finds his breathing comes evenly, deep and slow as though he's asleep. 

"Harry," he murmurs into the heated space between them. 

"Hmm?" 

"How long has it been since you've had a shower?" 

Harry laughs, and Draco would regret saying something as Harry pulls away, except that Harry _is_ kind of malodorous, and anyone who's been lying about in their own sadness should have a shower, anyway. "Is that how else you're helping me, then? Keeping on top of my personal hygiene?" 

"I mean, if you won't." Draco wants to lie back in Harry's bed and roll around. This is how comfortable couples talk, he thinks. Loving snipes at each other. "Have you forgotten how to bathe, too? Don't tell me you need me to come in there with you." 

There's a very pregnant pause as they look at each other, and Draco swallows around a tight throat, wondering if he's imagining how dark Harry's eyes seem to have gotten. Then again, the room itself is dark, so he must be. Then Harry laughs again. 

"I think I can work it out. I'll go scour myself, then." And Harry leaves the bedroom without another word. 

"And what am I meant to do while you're in there, clean your whole sodding house again?" Draco calls after him, with no response. "Tch." He rolls to his feet, stretching his back, and sets off downstairs to do just that, trying to ignore how giddy he feels. 

By the time the hiss of the shower turns off, Draco has managed to clear a path through the front hall and is working on the sitting room. Without his wand, Draco has to sort through everything by hand, making piles of clothes to take upstairs later. Harry comes downstairs rubbing a towel into his wet hair, dressed in a different T-shirt and sweatpants. "You didn't have to do that," he says as he comes off the last step and puts the towel around his shoulders, with a tinge of embarrassment. 

"But I did." Draco gathers up one of the piles of clothes and presses the bundle into Harry's arms. "Would you put these away?" 

"What are you, my wife?" Harry chuckles, mostly to himself, and Draco whirls to go tidy somewhere Harry can't see his red face. "No, er, Draco, I've got a better idea." A _whump_ sounds like Harry dumping the clothes back to the floor, and when Draco looks over his shoulder, he sees he's right. 

"Did you just drop those anywhere? After I picked them all up and gave you the simple task of at least taking them upstairs?" Draco wants to know, more indignant than he thought he'd be. 

"Well, yeah. I thought you might like this better." Harry is holding out Draco's wand. 

Draco stills, then takes stiff steps toward Harry. He doesn't reach for the wand. "You won't confiscate it again?" 

"Not until the Ministry makes me, no," Harry says with a rueful smile. 

"I don't think I can handle a second row over this thing, Harry." 

"I promise. I do. It's all yours right now." 

Draco casts Harry a suspicious look, but nods. "Alright." He lets Harry press the wand into his hand. 

The wand greets him with a cheery tingle that feels like the words _I missed you._ There is no grand reacquaintance this time, just a quick spark of the connection between Draco and his wand. Within minutes, Draco has the mess around them organizing itself again, with clothes floating up the stairs in a tidy queue, and the spells work so much faster now that everything has a designated place. 

"Thank you," Harry says, scratching the back of his neck. 

"Don't let it get this way again," Draco warns. "I'll check." 

"Even after the case is over?" Harry grins. 

"Yes, I'll burst in past all your wards and set fire to the house if I see so much as a fork out of place." 

"I already added you to the wards, so can we skip the fire?" He's standing so close to Draco's back, and Draco doesn't think it's unreasonable anymore when he imagines just sinking back into Harry's arms, maybe tilting his head to let Harry kiss his neck. _What are you, my wife?_ He could be. 

"I suppose I could let the old place go on without a razing," Draco says. He sets his organizational spells to continue without his conducting, and turns to Harry with a sober expression. "Do you still have all my work on the spell?" 

Harry bites his lip. "Yeah. Right where you left it." 

"And..." Draco grimaces. "You saw the Daily Prophet today?" 

Harry nods solemnly. 

After that, Draco only pauses to accept a strong cup of coffee from Harry. He really had been close to finishing the spell before their fight had knocked everything off course. At this point, Harry is only in the room for Draco to talk at, not to, making sure his spellcraft is sound. Fifteen years of just theory leave a bit of rust on the practical. 

Harry is asleep on the sofa by the time Draco completes the spell. 

"Harry," Draco murmurs, giving Harry's arm a gentle shake. 

"Is it finished?" Harry slurs as he jerks awake. 

"It's finished. We need to activate it at St. Mungo's." 

"What time is it?" Harry groans, and a wandless Tempus charm ignites at his flailing fingertips. It's four in the morning. "Let me get my bloody shoes on." 

Draco sways as Harry puts an arm around his shoulders. His body aches with exhaustion, his spine burning from leaning over his work; he clutches his wand as if he's trying to crush it. Harry swipes his other hand over his head, and his scalp goes stubbly in its wake. Draco gives him an odd look. 

"I mean," Harry says with a shrug, "nobody knows my hair's grown out. A wee hours appearance at St. Mungo's is not really when I want to debut a new look. Or old look." He clears his throat. "Don't look at me like that." 

"I'm not looking at you like anything," Draco lies with a scoff. "Are you sure you're alright to Apparate us, Harry? We could—" 

"Of course I am." And with no more warning than that, they're off, just like when Harry Apparated them to the canola fields. St. Mungo's has a decent amount of wards in place, the better to protect their patients especially in the face of the Rabid Dog Curse, and Harry goes through them like old cobwebs. 

For once in their long, complicated history, Draco is glad for Harry's fame, which keeps him from being subjected to long testy arguments about where he's allowed to go and why that list is so short. If the Ministry has sacked Harry in the past three days, the staff at St. Mungo's certainly haven't been informed, and it isn't long before Harry—and Draco, hurrying to keep up behind him—is escorted to that same strange, hushed part of the hospital where Draco had first seen Auror Pertinger. 

"Here," the orderly says, and Draco realizes with a start it's the same orderly who gave him information on the victims' magic draining. Before he can quite grok what he's doing, he's clutching at her hand, and she looks at him with a mix of alarm and confusion. 

"We couldn't have done this without you," he says, trying to be as urgent as possible for someone slurring every other word. Salazar help him, maybe he's too tired to cast the spell, but it doesn't matter. Harry hasn't said so, but Draco knows he would agree with the fact that someone could die within the hours they might take to sleep. "If this works, you'll have helped save—" He can't count. "—So many lives." 

Draco doesn't remember what her reaction is. He's standing in front of a bed where a restrained wizard is sleeping fitfully; even in dreams, Venari Virtute's victims try to cast the spell, his hand shaking with half-formed wand movements, his lips chapped with sleep-mumbled incantations. The wizard's name is Harper Littletree, according to the orderly. Harry puts a hand on Draco's shoulder. The orderly puts a bottle in his free hand, and Draco looks at both the bottle and the orderly curiously. 

"An enervating potion," the orderly explains. "We use it on the wards quite a bit—maybe even a bit too much," she admits with a grimace and a glance upward. "But it'll make you feel instantly awake. A tiny sip's worth about a half hour. The whole bottle usually lasts a full shift." 

Being awake for another eight hours sounds like torture. Draco lifts the bottle to his lips, and lets only the barest amount pass them. It tastes bitter and sickly sweet at the same time, wholly unappealing, but almost as soon as he's drunk it he can feel its effects. His back pain isn't gone, but he feels alert, and he hands the bottle back to the orderly with a sincere thanks. 

Draco brandishes his wand. Harry's hand moves from his shoulder to his back, a comforting weight and warmth. 

" _Virtutem sequor,_ " Draco says, and his wand takes a winding path through the air, so unlike the stabbing motion associated with its sister spell. _Follow power._ He closes his eyes to better visualize the way he attaches the spell to Harper Littletree's magical core. Like this, he can see some of this victim's magic has already been siphoned off. Draco keeps his wand moving as he works, striking a balance between speed and care that wears at his focus, but it's the only way the spell will work, at least when it's crafted by him. 

He doesn't exhale until the attachment is complete, and he sags against Harry. What little energy he got from the enervating potion seems to have been eaten by casting the spell. "You've done it," Harry murmurs against the top of Draco's head, and Draco doesn't even care if the orderly is still in the room to see it. He wants to pillow his whole body against Harry's and fall asleep right here. 

Yet again, Draco doesn't quite remember how he gets to his next location. He's dimly aware of walking back out to the lobby, and the squeezing sensation of being Side-Alonged, but he doesn't remember going up the stairs at Twelve Grimmauld Place. Careful hands lay him out on a soft surface that must be a bed, and pull off his shoes, open the throat of his robes and the shirt beneath. Draco puts his own groggy hand to the fly of his trousers; he hates to sleep with a waistband choking him. He's fairly sure he's not the one who finishes the unbuttoning, and then his trousers are being tugged off his legs. 

The last thing he remembers with any clarity is the bed dipping under a second body beside him, and Harry's voice whispering, "Goodnight, Draco."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> almost to the end! the next update will be a bit of a finale, and the last update after that will wrap everything up, a bit more fully than what i would consider an epilogue. 
> 
> thank you to all my readers and commenters so far! i love all your questions and outbursts and thoughts so far; they've really made this fic all that much more fun to work on, and i hope with each update that you'll like the fic even more.


	6. interlude: harry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a moment with harry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is part of a double update, which is why the chapter count went up by one again!

Hermione is speaking to him. He needs to focus, climb out of the hole he's in. Put his eyes on her. He needs to process her words, respond to them. These are all things Harry knows. 

"Harry." 

But he's going to scream. Or he's going to cry. Either way, he won't have control. 

"Harry, mate. Please." 

Ron is in it too, now. He can't ignore them both. He flexes his hands, wishing he could cut them off. They might be violent. _He_ might be violent. He already _has_ been violent. That's why he needs to leave, and consequently, why Ron and Hermione won't let him leave. 

Harry opens his eyes. 

He's sitting at their kitchen table, in their house in Chudley. Ron and Hermione sit across from him; Hermione's eyes are rimmed red, and Ron's long nose has gone red from crying. 

"I'm not changing my mind," he says, words passing through lips that feel numb. 

"You don't have to do this," Hermione says, reaching across the table toward Harry's hands. His hand feels lifeless, like she's holding hands with a marionette. "Don't you know we can help you through this?" 

"We've been through so much worse," Ron pleads. He takes Harry's other hand. "I _know _you know that. Don't be an idiot, Harry, please."__

__Harry pulls his hands away from theirs, putting them to his face. "I'm out of control. And you're—you're going to have another child. You need to think of your children."_ _

__"I'm always thinking of my children," Hermione snaps, then inhales deeply, schooling her face into one of plaintive calm again. "And I don't want to deprive them of their family."_ _

__"What good is shutting yourself away from your friends going to do?" Ron asks, before Harry can respond to Hermione. "You're not going to get better on your own. Nobody does."_ _

__Harry doesn't even remember what he'd been angry about. He'd been shouting, felt engulfed by his own volume, pulled out of his own body by the force of his words. He'd drawn his wand, or his body had, pressing the blunt tip to Ron's neck and it had felt like he was watching someone else do it. Someone possessed of his form and his voice, ruining his relationships with Harry as their helpless audience._ _

__He feels—splintered. As though his personality has been shattered, the pieces spread so far from each other that the threads connecting them, keeping them all "Harry," are stretched brittle and thin. Every emotion feels too pure, too big, bigger than what little _self_ Harry might still have. _ _

__The irony doesn't escape him. He wonders, when he thinks of himself like this, if destroying his emotions will work like destroying Horcruxes._ _

__Hermione gets up with effort, weighed down by her massive pregnant belly. She puts a hand to Harry's shoulder, squeezing, and whether she means it as a gesture of support or as a way to keep him in place, Harry isn't quite sure. "We're getting you help, Harry. You've got a habit of thinking you have to go it alone, even through all the years we've _never_ let you do that." _ _

__"And that's final," Ron agrees with a nod._ _

__But Harry looks at Hermione's belly, and fear strangles him from the inside. All he sees is something so vulnerable he knows he cannot be near it. Ron and Hermione already know the sex of their baby, have already picked out the name Hugo, and Hugo will be so tiny and fragile. And Harry is a bomb._ _

__They're not going to let him go, his friends that he loves. If he knows them, they'll resort to whatever they have to do. They'll bring in other old friends, like Neville, like Luna. They'll bring in Ginny to really slap him about and make him see reason, because she's especially fearless when it comes to Harry, and not just because of their ex-relationship. They'll lock him into the Burrow, where Molly Weasley will descend on him with embraces and hot food and a tearful but stern admonishment for thinking he didn't have a family he could depend on. They'll do anything for him, past, present, future._ _

__Which is exactly why he can't risk hurting them. He pulls Hermione's hand from his shoulder, gives her knuckles a chaste kiss before dropping her hand, and nods at Ron._ _

__And he Disapparates._ _

__Not to his home at Twelve Grimmauld Place, no, because that's the first place they'll look for him if they follow him. Not to the Forest of Dean, because they already know all the spots he visits when he goes there, having lived through that time in the forest themselves._ _

__He Apparates into the center of a vast, yellow-studded field, and takes deep breaths of the chill night air. Unless you count the bugs flitting through the stalks, or the mice scurrying beneath the leaves, he's alone. No one to worry at him, or for him; no one who might press at him, _Harry, you need help, Harry, don't ignore us, Harry, it'll be alright,_ until he bursts and makes things worse. Again. _ _

__No one to hurt._ _

__He stays in the field for hours, bathing in the moonlight and drinking in his solitude, until he's pretty sure Ron and Hermione won't be looking for him at his home anymore. Then he Apparates home, where he immediately sets about removing everyone he loves from his wards, and disconnecting the house from the Floo network. He will be alone. He will not hurt anyone anymore. He will regain control. He will be alone. Everyone will be safe. He will be alone._ _

_____ _

☾

Of course, neither Ron, Hermione, nor the rest of his friends leave it at that. Harry knew they wouldn't, if he's honest with himself; it's their inability to let people suffer that makes them such amazing people. Hermione makes spirited attempts to get past Harry's strengthened wards at Grimmauld Place. Ron nearly catches him in the lift at the Ministry on more than one occasion. Owls from Ron, Hermione, Neville, Luna, Ginny, George, Dean, Seamus, Molly, Arthur, Molly _and_ Arthur together, Hagrid, Charlie, Bill, Andromeda, Andromeda and Teddy, Teddy on his own, and even bloody Fleur, of all people, flood Harry's front room. There's even one from Headmistress McGonagall that makes Harry feel like a student caught out of bounds just seeing it. But every letter goes unopened and unanswered.

He will be alone. 

In the midst of Harry's attempts at isolation, he receives a promotion. Now he'll be leading raids—directing small crews of other Aurors while he heads the charge. More than ever, he'll be front lines, the first to the scene and the last to leave. 

His first raid as a leader sees him and his team into a den of Dark Magic, the squalid air thick with red bolts as the criminals inside the house scatter. Their own wards, designed to keep them hidden from Muggles and wixen alike, keep them from Apparating out and Harry himself strikes many of them down. It's not until he reaches the center of the house—a house so easily hidden for being on a quiet Muggle street—that he sees what they were truly up to. 

A child. They were using a child for blood magic. A child who is now dead, their bony little limbs splayed across the filthy floor, one sunken cheek pressed to the wood beneath. Harry's chest swells tight with rage and despair, suddenly inhabiting that child who must have died miserable and cold, knowing only that they were not loved and that no one would save them. The only difference between this child and the one he was is that he kept on breathing. 

He can feel his emotions surging up, clawing for dominance; he's going to scream, he's going to draw his wand and destroy something, or he's going to keep his wand sheathed and destroy _everything_. This house will be leveled because all he sees when he looks at this tiny corpse is himself. 

But—

Harry draws his hand over his face, and it's like throwing a blanket of ice over his emotions. Not here. None of his emotions are needed here. No, what's needed is Auror Potter. 

Without exploding, Auror Potter discovers where the rest of the children have been hidden in the house, behind a false wall in the basement. They are similarly bony and dirty, but they are _alive_ , and Auror Potter calls for backup to help him and his team transport the children to warmth and safety. Auror Potter also goes on to round up the bastards who thought of children as a disposable resource, catching the ones who escaped the house within the week. 

Harry builds a cage for his every feeling, and a new face for his new placid self; one with shorn hair, and a cold expression that will not be shaken by evil. His friends don't give up on him, exactly, but then Hermione gives birth, and she and Ron are busy with a newborn and a toddler all at once, and Harry is a wall to the rest of his friends besides. All their efforts over several months are so much seafoam dashed against the rocks. 

Auror Potter, bereft now of friends, becomes Head Auror Potter, bereft now of emotion. His new steely personality, if it could be called one, lends itself well to the work. Nothing fazes Head Auror Potter, the department head who won't stay at his desk, and his solve rate is one of the highest the department has ever seen. And if Harry, buried deep inside Head Auror Potter, howls at the barrage of corpses, blood, viscera, the unmistakable stench of the Dark Arts permeating it all—well, Head Auror Potter knows just the cage to stuff him into. It just takes him a moment, sometimes. 

Then Draco Malfoy reenters his world. Just as much a whirlwind of entitlement, sharp remarks and words meant to provoke as he ever has been, somehow focused from his first step into the Auror offices on dragging Harry out of his icy disguise. For the first time in years, Head Auror Potter slips. 

And Malfoy catches him. Draco catches Harry. 

When Harry tumbles into the canola fields outside the Malfoy estate, dragging in breaths so deep it makes him dizzy, he looks up and Draco Malfoy's head is haloed by the brilliant sun, the ends of his tallow-colored hair lit like fire. He's something ethereal, a being of light offering his strange generosity. _Thank you,_ Harry says, the only words he can manage when his heart is hammering his ribs. 

It's not the first time he's seen Malfoy in new light; no, that would go to the time Malfoy found him on one of his late night wanderings, and Malfoy met him where he was at. No worrying. No pleading. _I keep having the same nightmare._ Offering himself, his self, to Harry instead. 

But it is the first time he sees Malfoy completely, he thinks. Not the loud boy he was, not really; now he's a man with thinning hair and twitching, flapping hands that he tries to hide when he knows he's being watched. Now vulnerable, afraid, isolated, traits that echo through the chasm inside Harry. Now compassionate, brave in spite of himself, bringing Harry back from the brink. Now asking to be called Draco. 

It's strange to think how much Harry wants to spend all his time with Draco, all while Ron and Hermione and the rest of them get on with their lives without Harry. It's strange that with Draco, Harry feels all the pieces of himself, his self, pulled back into place. Jokes roll off his tongue. He grins easily, rakishly, devilishly, sincerely. He makes tea that makes Little Lord Malfoy gasp in horror, and he considers whether Draco's tried curry takeaway before, and whether he should introduce him if not. He thinks about things other than Auror business and how much it hurts to exist. 

Draco makes him whole. He can't deny it. Especially not now, the sky beyond the windows just beginning to lighten as Harry lays down next to Draco where he's sprawled on top of the covers. Draco is already asleep, put under by the exhaustion of his important work, but Harry finds a new feeling wedging itself in with the others as he watches Draco's sleeping face, serene and soft. His hands twitch with the urge to caress that face, feel how peaceful he never is when he's awake. 

Harry doesn't know if he's felt this way before. He knows what he thought he felt for Ginny, and even for Cho, and he knows in the end he had been fooling himself. (If nothing else, Ginny had been doing much the same, and seemed so happy with Luna when last he saw her, five years ago.) He and Ginny had been each other's escape, each hiding in the other's embrace against the crushing pressure of the war, against the storm of life. 

But Draco—a man who downplays his own problems but won't let Harry do the same—Draco puts Harry back together and then pulls him into that storm to brave it together. Harry feels as though he breathes new air when he's with Draco, clean and sharp after rain. 

He wants to do something for Draco. He's _going_ to do something for Draco.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is part of a double update, so if you're just catching up, PLEASE be sure to go back and read chapter 6 (interlude: harry) as well. 
> 
> this got extremely long, whew! i actually cut it off before i even originally meant to, but i think it's working out. a hearty thank you to this update's betas, Saphira and ThestralHouseofBlack for doing such excellent work, and a shoutout to spacehubsands who was busy conquering university this week—you've got this! 
> 
> a quick warning: there's a short part of this chapter that includes harry being angry and drunk, should that kind of thing bother you

For the first time in a long time, Draco wakes up slowly. 

Sunlight streams across his chest through drapes he doesn't recall being open when he fell asleep, warming him and making him feel sleepy all over again. There's a comforting weight against his shoulder he's too relaxed to be interested in identifying. His body aches from the previous night's marathon of spellwork, but there's a soft coverlet over him and a firm mattress beneath him, a salve to his pain. The sheets feel good against his naked legs. 

It's that particular detail that finally brings Draco rapidly up to speed with reality. His robes are twisted around his upper body, and his shirt is creased against his skin, but from the waist down all he's got on is his underwear. (Teal, printed with bananas, tight, purchased at a Muggle shop.) 

And Harry is next to him. Not awake, no, but under the coverlet with him, his head pillowed against the arm he has draped across Draco's shoulder. There's a thin line of drool at the corner of his mouth, and Draco can't believe he didn't notice Harry's gentle snoring until now. Draco shifts his leg under the covers, and finds Harry's own just next to it. 

A rush of fantasizing crashes over Draco like a wave. Harry could wake up, smile at him with sleepy and gentle eyes, touch his face before giving him a chaste kiss good morning. They might snipe at each other about morning breath, laugh with each other before ignoring said morning breath and kissing deeper. Harry could skim his fingers down Draco's body beneath the blanket, teasing at the waistband of Draco's stupid banana-printed Muggle underwear—

Draco shifts uncomfortably. This is the worst time to fend off arousal. But his imagination refuses to stop, showing Draco the best way to throw back the coverlet and straddle Harry's wide, strong hips, how Harry might put equally wide, strong hands at Draco's waist to pin him there. 

He has to get up. Draco throws back the coverlet to get out of bed, instead, shaking his head violently as he hunts for his trousers. He's annoyed to find them on the floor, rumpled from being in a pile all night, but he finds his wand on the bedside table, and taps his trousers to puff them full of steam that smooths out every wrinkle in the blink of an eye. This would have been so much more aggravating without magic, and he pauses to be grateful to have his wand back again. God, he's going to miss it once the tracking spell finishes its work. 

By the time he gets back from the bathroom, bladder empty, trousers on, and hair and robes put into some kind of order, Harry is sitting on the side of the bed, his side of the coverlet also tossed aside to fold the whole thing into a triangle. Draco berates himself for being disappointed to see that Harry was wearing shorts the whole while. 

"Good morning," Draco says, to be louder than the argument with himself currently brewing in his head. Harry looks up, and gives Draco a smile so much like the one in his fantasy he wants to run right back into the hall. "Ready to get sacked today?" 

"Ready to tell them we've been working hard for three days straight," Harry snorts, getting to his feet. "Come on then." 

Draco can't help but complain, on their way downstairs, that he'd like to go home and have a shower and a fresh change of clothes before being looked up and down by Williamson and Larch and the lot of them, but Harry says, "Doesn't really sell the story, does it?" with a wicked grin that makes Draco think Harry really is a bit of a Slytherin under all that Gryffindor bravado. Draco sighs more than strictly necessary, his skin itching with a need for a scrubbing after sleeping in his clothes, but he follows Harry out to the front steps anyway. He doesn't need the Side Along, either, as an adult perfectly capable of Apparition, but—well. Who would he be if he missed a chance to be close to Harry? 

It's past noon by the time they get into the Auror offices, which means the news of the successfully applied tracking spell must have reached the DMLE before Harry could deliver it himself, because they walk in to tumultuous applause. Auror Larch claps so hard he manages to ruffle his own hair, and Williamson beams from the back of the room. 

"To Head Auror Potter!" Williamson bellows, and the Aurors roar back their cheers in return. 

"To Malfoy!" Williamson bellows this, too, and Draco braces himself for a poor response—but the returning roar is just as hearty as it was for Harry, and might even be stretching on longer. 

"To the end of the Rabid Dog Curse!" Larch shouts, and this time the response is deafening, the charmed windows of the office practically rattling in their frames. 

Mafalda Hopkirk pokes her grey head into the office from the corner hall, scowling. "Really, now!" And the entire office breaks out in laughter that just makes her harrumph as she withdraws. 

Just about a minute later, the Aurors settle determinedly into their work, returning to the flow of their strange little beehive as if nothing had ever interrupted it. Apparently Sundays do nothing to thin the herd, the offices full and buzzing. Harry admits that as much as he seems to have easily played off their three day absence, he does now have a three day backlog to get through as Head Auror. "Meet me at mine tomorrow? Say, eleven in the morning?" Harry asks, hand on the knob of his office door. 

"Eleven on a Monday morning, Harry?" Draco scoffs. "How aristocratic of you. Didn't you just say you have masses of work to get through?" 

"A man's got to take a lunch, hasn't he?" Harry replies, and leaves Draco with that as he ducks into his office. With the spell affixed to Harper Littletree, Draco has no more work to do but wait for the spell to give him its signal. Williamson shows him how to mirror the signal in one of the office's many alarms, and then he leaves, too glad to go home and clean himself up. 

He can't, of course, stop thinking about his morning with Harry, by which he means he can't stop thinking of all the different paths it could have followed. All the delicious tributaries of kissing Harry and being kissed in return, of pulling away wrinkled robes and shirts and tracing fingers down hot skin, of Harry putting kisses there, instead. 

Draco calls over Pansy and Blaise to take his mind off it, because he must. And Greg, too, because nothing will keep him from erotic thoughts quite like listening to Greg talk about his new passion, which is beer and the brewing of it. Bless his friends and their annoying approach to hobbies. 

He does have to assure an irritated Pansy and aloof Blaise that he really is okay, but then Greg wants to know what could have made him not okay, and he _really_ doesn't want to explain himself. Not when he's trying to not think about Harry. Pansy gives Greg's shoulder a light smack and says she'll tell him in the kitchen, both a blessing and a curse. Pansy is bound to make it salacious, but at least Draco won't have to say it, nor hear it. 

Draco sets out snack foods and thinks about Harry's insinuation about their meeting tomorrow. _A man's got to have lunch, hasn't he?_ And he curses himself before forcing himself to ask Greg, with a pained smile, what exactly it is that hops add to a brew. 

"Pans," Draco says later, while Greg is hunting for the nearest lavatory and Blaise is downstairs judging the Malfoy wine collection, "let me paint you a scenario, and you tell me what it means." 

"Oh, I love this already," she snickers, drumming her fingertips against the side of her wine glass, which she's holding wrong again. "Alright then, debase yourself." 

Draco rolls his eyes. "I couldn't, you debase yourself so well I'm too self conscious to try it for myself." 

"Draco." 

His resolve weakens with every second, but he clears his throat. "Say a man invites you over to his place," he begins. 

"Draco!" Pansy exclaims, face full of devilish delight. "Are you going to have sex? I'm going to call for Blaise!" And she lifts her wand to her throat, ready to fire off a Sonorus—

"Let me finish, you hag!" Draco says, darting forward across the coffee table to bat her wand off-target. Pansy keeps laughing. "I—alright. Say a man does that! Say he invites you over and says something about a lunch break, because he's asked you to come over at eleven in the bloody morning." 

"Is that the whole picture? Does Master grant me permission to speak?" Pansy asks, arching both brows. 

"Yes, that's the whole picture," Draco grouses, settling back deep into his chair. 

"Then I'd say I was right the first time," she cackles. "An afternoon delight, Draco!" 

"It's not afternoon!" 

"It will be by the time this _man_ is done with you!" 

Draco groans, sliding down in his seat until his back is flush with the bottom cushion, his knees at awkward angles in front of him. "I should have known better than to ask you." 

"And who would you have asked otherwise? Blaise would have given you the same answer, and I don't think Greg would manage to get past the man part." 

"I've been out for years." 

"Poor Gregory Goyle. Memory like a sieve." 

"Except when it comes to the difference between an American pale ale and an Indian pale ale," Draco snorts. 

"What about ale?" Greg asks as he walks back in. "I can recommend you some good summer ales." He glances at Draco. "That's no good for your back, Draco." 

"Thanks, Healer Goyle," Draco drawls, and pulls himself back up with a wince. 

"Told you," Greg says, taking a slow and heavy return to his seat.

☾

Draco waits on the stairs leading up to Harry's front door the next morning, feeling like he's going to vibrate right out of his skin. "Afternoon delight," he scoffs to himself. "'Oh, Draco, are you going to have sex?'" he sneers, pitching his voice high and nasal in a wildly inaccurate impression of Pansy. "Bloody Pansy. Idiot Pansy."

"What are you muttering about?" Harry's voice asks, just behind Draco, and Draco just about spits his heart out. 

"About you summoning me here without telling me what for," Draco says, voice as haughty as he can make it, the better to mask his nerves. "I don't know your intentions. They could be _impure._ " 

"And yet you showed up anyway," Harry says, smirking at Draco as he passes him by on the steps. He taps his hand to the front door, and it swings open gently. "Not too good for a bit of impurity, are you?" 

Draco opens his mouth in indignation, and gets nothing out but the dregs of a squawk. Harry rolls his lips under his teeth, rolling his eyes as if to say _Okay then!_ before heading inside. Draco doesn't even know what to make of that, but he hurries after Harry, not about to be left outside. 

"What are your intentions, then?" Draco asks. He notes that in the last 36 hours or so since he's been here, Harry's managed to not turn the house into a pigpen again. Draco nudges a few misplaced items with silent organizing charms anyway, gratified enough not to mention them. 

"Fairly pure, don't worry," Harry says. He picks up something Draco can't see past his robes, and beckons Draco right back out to the front steps. "Off we get." 

"Why ask me here if we're not staying?" Draco says, unable to keep the mild irritation out of his voice. He's simultaneously relieved and disappointed that Pansy was wrong, bu tries to lean more toward relief. After all, Pansy will hate being wrong. 

"Oh, I just wanted the real destination to be a surprise," Harry says, holding out his arm. "I mean, it's somewhere we've both been, but that's a little bit of the point. Now come on, Draco." 

"Oh, look at you. One day you're buttering me up, 'oh, Draco, you make me whole again!' and the next you're giving me commands," Draco sniffs, even as he approaches Harry. "Feel like a big man, do you? Ordering about your archnemesis?" 

"Don't you remember? You've been downgraded to friendly rival," Harry snickers. "Or upgraded, it's all in how you look at it." 

"A downgrade. Nobody remembers friendly rivals." Draco puts a delicate hand on Harry's arm. "How very dare you." 

"Snob." 

"Plebeian." 

"Posh twat." 

"Tasteless wanker!" 

Harry's face splits with a massive grin, and suddenly Draco is being Side Alonged. Draco comes out the other end spluttering, tearing away from Harry to run his hands along his body checking for signs of splinching—Harry hadn't needed to make it so _sudden._ He's so preoccupied, in fact, that at first he doesn't realize where they are. 

A sea of gold. 

And judging by the size and placement of the manor on the horizon, this is the exact spot in the canola fields where Harry had pulled Draco after the Dendron incident. The spot where Harry had finished Draco off, really, calling him by his first name and more than that calling him _kind_ , insisting on it when Draco had tried to say he was wrong. Draco knows now that's when he fell all the way for Harry Potter, no longer shuffling along the precipice of it. 

Draco turns to see that Harry's laid out a blanket, the sea of gold parted in a neat square to accommodate it. There's a massive open umbrella laying on its side in the blanket's center, like the sort of umbrellas people take to the shore, providing extra shade. And Harry's laying out plates on the other end of it. 

"A picnic?" Draco asks, otherwise dumbstruck. 

"Er—something like that," Harry says, continuing to set out food. "Lunch?" 

"Lunch on a blanket, in a field, in the middle of the day," Draco says as he approaches the blanket. Cushioning charms below keep him from feeling the firm earth and pebbles under his knees when he kneels. "Yes, a bloody picnic." If he weren't so _himself_ , he'd say thank you. 

Harry snorts. "Whatever you want it to be. Now look," he says, tugging at Draco's sleeve as he arranges himself cross-legged on the blanket. "I've made a fucking charcuterie and cheese board from Waitrose, so I want you to look at it, acknowledge it, appreciate it." 

"And what in the hell is Waitrose? Is that supposed to impress me?" Draco wants to know, even as he does as he's asked and looks at the charcuterie and cheese board, acknowledges it, and—well, he's done that much. Harry forgot that Draco's got to be a judgmental git before he can appreciate anything. "Tell me what's on this board." 

"Oh, uh..." Harry scrunches his nose in sudden concentration. "The cheese is..." He touches the different items as he names them; a soft sheep milk cheese, mild and pungent, next to a heady goat's cheese that looks zesty and crumbly. Thin ribbons of prosciutto, hearty slices of soppressata, a modest helping of Iberico ham that does, in fact, have Draco nodding in appreciation. Harry hasn't laid the board out neatly, and Draco picks up a black olive that's rolled off onto the blanket before flicking it out into the field. Some bird is going to love that little salt bomb. 

"And Waitrose, I'll have you know," Harry adds, "is bloody expensive, is what it is. If it weren't for your stupid highbrow tastes I would have just gone to Tesco's like any other peasant. _And_ I went to Bellavita for the soppressata." 

"I don't know what those places are, either," Draco says with a characteristic drawl. "Some Muggle establishments, I'm sure, judging the context. Say as many Muggle names as you like, I'm not going to get it any better." 

"Fine, don't say thanks for all the trouble I've gone to," Harry says, but there's no venom to it. "What about this?" 

A teapot joins them on the blanket, suddenly, bringing with it a small glass teacup Draco's never seen before. A tightly-wrapped ball of leaves sits in the teacup's bottom, and when the teapot levitates to pour a neat stream of boiling water over it, the leaves unfurl into a flower that radiates a delicate color into the water. 

Draco finds an uncomfortable knot in his throat, and he tries valiantly to clear it out. "Well, that's just beautiful," he says, trying to sound flippant about it and not quite succeeding at that, either. "Just the one cup?" 

"I've got my cup," Harry says with a shrug, suddenly clutching a mug Draco hadn't seen before; there's a telltale tag on a string hanging from its rim. "That one's for you." 

"Oh." Draco reaches for the teacup, which seems to sprout a saucer as if Harry's only just remembered it. The knot in his throat is a full-blown lump now, choking him and making him blink rapidly. "What are you trying to do to me, Potter?" 

"I see. I'm nice to you and it's back to Potter, is it?" Harry chuckles. 

"Why are you doing all this?" Draco wants to know, because he can't just _accept_ an act of kindness. 

Harry fidgets with his mug. "Well, you invited me over for, er, what'd you call it? Wine and horse divorce?" 

"Hors d'oeuvres," Draco says with a sniff, knowing Harry's winding him up on purpose over pedantry and not caring. 

"Right, that's what I said. Well, I fucked it all up and it never happened, plus I crashed whatever little snacky get-together you were having with your friends. So." Harry gestures at the food, and Draco notices there are dark strawberries, rosemary crackers—petit fours, for the love of Merlin. Were it anyone but Harry, Draco would think he was being seduced. He _is_ seduced, because it _is_ Harry, but also because the strawberries look ripe and the petit fours look like something someone might feed their lover by hand. 

"So," Draco echoes, plucking a strawberry from its little basket. It's ridiculously sweet, like a piece of fruit from a dream. 

"Yes, so. I felt bad, alright? I—" Harry swallows. Draco fights the urge to pull the teabag out of his mug—surely the tea is burning by now. "I just wanted to fix it. To make it up to you." 

"You could have just rescheduled," Draco says faintly, scooping the jasmine flower from his tea with a spoon that materializes on his saucer. This, too, he flings into the field after the olive. "I still have the wine." 

"I mean, you can get the wine," Harry says into his mug as he takes a sip. "Bugger. I left the teabag in too long." Draco wants to say _I told you so_ , but he'd never actually told Harry. "I just—" He sets the mug down. "I said you pull me back together, but it's not that simple, is it? I still lose control. I still hurt people." 

Harry wraps his arms around his drawn-up legs, tapping his shins as he looks over the field, away from Draco. "But after everything, and then you going all the way to Ron and Hermione, to hear they still want me around even after all this time, it really drives it home that having no one near me doesn't rid me of the power to hurt. It'll always be there." Harry presses a hand to his collarbone. "Waiting." 

A breeze runs its spectral hand over the field, ruffling Harry's hair. It's clean, now, looking soft and inviting as it curls around Harry's beautiful face. 

"So I've got to work at it," Harry finishes. "This is the start." 

"And you're doing that all on your own, are you?" Draco goes for casual and overshoots into worried, much to his own consternation. He reaches for the board, slices off a corner of Brebirousse with the tiny curved cheese knife. 

"I—" Harry looks stricken. "I can't ask someone to do the work for me." 

"You're such an idiot, do you know what?" Draco says with a roll of his eyes, nibbling at the soft piece of cheese before deciding it's too soft to hold onto much longer and puts the whole bite in his mouth. "Asking for help isn't lumping the whole thing off onto someone else." 

"There's just a lot." Harry sighs, maneuvering around until he's lying on his stomach, facing the food so he can grab a cracker, which he tops with a bit of Chevre. "We don't have to talk about this, you know. I brought you here to enjoy yourself." 

"I enjoy watching friendly rivals deconstruct themselves, I'll have you know." Draco leans back on his arms. "I'm also hurt you've so handily dismissed all the help I've given you so far. What happened to making you whole?" 

"I didn't mean—" 

"I'm teasing you. _Please_ catch up," Draco says with a smirk, but he does mean it, just a little bit. All he wants is to be a real part of Harry's life. 

"I can't ask you to help me with all of it. Or to keep doing it." Harry munches thoughtfully on the cracker bite he's constructed. "Rosemary might have been a mistake." 

"No, you just paired it with the wrong cheese, unsurprisingly," Draco says with a roll of his eyes. 

"I try," Harry says, sounding so melodramatically put upon, " _so_ hard to get it right for His Majesty and _still_ he's not satisfied. Will I ever measure up to the royal standard? Will I ever be able to smell a wine at ten meters and know exactly what its barreler had for breakfast in 1675?" 

"That's not how wine tasting works!" Draco cries, more exasperated than he means to. "And we haven't even got the wine, because _you_ thought the proper response to shouting at me over a bungled lunch invitation was to lay me out a romantic picnic from a Muggle shop!" 

"Two Muggle shops," Harry points out. "You haven't even tasted the soppressata yet." 

"Of course I couldn't help you with all of it, anyway," Draco says, huffing as he snatches up a slice of said soppressata. "I'd die from the indignity of you constantly saying things like 'horse divorce' and 'I don't know, cheese?' because you're too much of a hooligan to appreciate the art of food and drink." 

"And other posh twat activities," Harry points out. 

"But Harry," Draco continues, pointedly ignoring that last barb, "you could honestly try therapy." 

"What, a Mind Healer?" Harry scoffs. "Not likely. I'm not letting some professional stranger root about in my head." 

"No, _listen_ to the words I say," Draco says, giving Harry's shoulder a gentle shove. "A therapist." 

Harry frowns. "I don't think trying to dance around the magical aspects of my life with a Muggle is going to do much to help." 

Draco sucks his teeth. He wants to be a patient person, so he will, just like Dr. Fiddlewood said he should. "You could try my therapist. She caters to the magical community but practices strictly non-magical therapy. No Legilimens or anything." He thinks of Dr. Fiddlewood's tick analogy, and purses his lips with a bit of disgust. "Just talking." 

Harry worries at his lip, pulling up a piece of prosciutto. "Maybe." 

"You can do better than a maybe. Give me a date and I'll escort you." 

Harry rolls onto his back, nearly upending the strawberries, and waggles his eyebrows at Draco. "Escort me on a date, will you?" 

Draco has nothing appropriate to say to that, and as he pinkens Harry looks about as embarrassed. Both men clear their throats and look away. 

The awkward quiet doesn't last, though. Harry agrees he'll let Draco take him to Dr. Fiddlewood's office, though he's not ready to commit to a particular day yet. His backlog, he says, as though he's not out in Wiltshire right now ignoring that backlog in Draco's company. Draco sighs and makes a note to nag Harry about it later, and they fall into easier chatter. 

First, Draco fills Harry in a little more thoroughly about his visit with the Granger-Weasleys, including getting punched in the bottom by their gremlin of a son, who seemed to think Draco was some kind of miscreant out to seduce his mum away from the family. That gets big laughs from Harry, who says Draco is just the type to look like a homewrecker. When Draco wants to know what that means, Harry changes the subject. 

Then Harry grouses about work; he hates the paperwork, the gladhanding, the oversight. He quietly admits he could use a change from all the literal horrors of the job, too, but it's clear he doesn't want to discuss that further. Instead he complains about Auror Larch always being halfway up his arse, trying to impress him, and Draco does what he thinks is a fabulous impression of Larch's excitable brown-nosing. 

After that, there's no one topic that holds them for long, meandering from one to the next. Together, Harry and Draco make short work of the whole spread, and Draco does conjure a bottle of Pinot Grigio directly from the manor's wine cellar, because a little cup of tea doesn't quite quench the thirst brought on by a stellar Iberico. 

"I just think it would behoove you, as a man in his thirties, to care about food on this level on a regular basis," Draco says as he pours Harry a second glass. He feels warm from the wine and the sun, and from sitting so close to Harry. 

"I just like more food than you," Harry says, accepting the glass. "I'm not picky. I never have been. It, uh, didn't _behoove_ me in the past." 

"I like food! I like plenty of food. I just like _good_ food, because I respect food. And drink." 

"And other posh activities," Harry laughs again. 

"You forgot to call me a twat that time." 

"Mm." Harry's non-reply is hummed into his glass, eyes closed with enjoyment. He lays back slowly under the umbrella, wine glass held loosely at his side so it doesn't tip over. 

They're quiet again, the only sounds the breeze, the buzz of insects and chirp of birds, the clink of the heavy wine bottle against the fragile wine glass as Draco pours his own serving. 

Harry looks so happy like this, stretched out with a full belly like a sunning housecat. The golden light filtered through the tall flowers makes his dark skin seem to glimmer, and his plush lips are curved into an easy, sated smile beneath gently closed eyes. A far cry from the man he met his first day reporting to the Ministry, wound so tight he could barely breathe, so far removed from his true self he was nearly unrecognizable. 

Draco is well and truly in love. He can't deny it. 

_You're the only person brave enough to be close to me._ Harry's voice peals clear in his head. Draco licks his lips nervously. 

"Harry," he says, plunging ahead before his rational self can intervene. "Did you mean it when you said you thought I was brave?" 

Harry's eyes flick open, regarding Draco lazily. "Of course I did. I didn't make it easy for you, did I?" He chuckles. "You fought so hard to pull me out of my own stupidity that I hated you all over again, in the beginning. And you did it more than once. So yeah, of course you're brave, Draco." Harry's eyes start to slide closed again. 

_Say it. Say it. Say it._ Now or never, this setup will never work again and Draco will never work up the courage to try it again, he knows it. He swallows again, puts a hand to his throat as if that will loosen the way anxiety has tightened it. 

"Kiss me?" 

There's a thunderous roaring in Draco's ears as soon as the two disastrous words escape him, and he knows he must be flushing blotchy and red. Harry's eyes open wide, this time, and Draco looks away immediately with a hand clapped over his own mouth. 

What a stupid delivery. He sounds like a pathetic teenager. Any moment Harry's going to get up and leave, too good to laugh but too uncomfortable to stay. He should say something else, something more mature to take the pressure off so Harry knows he can tell him to fuck off. "You can ignore me, if you want, it was stup—" 

In all his embarrassment, Draco didn't hear Harry shuffling behind him. A hand, Harry's hand, reaches to turn his face, and Draco only has a moment to realize what's happening, to see Harry's soft gaze meeting his, before he's being kissed. 

Harry's lips are soft and full, and as insistent as the hand he presses to the small of Draco's back to support them both. Draco doesn't waste a moment before he kisses Harry in return, only a little afraid, bringing a hand up to the back of Harry's neck. 

Harry breaks away, but he doesn't let go of Draco, putting his forehead to Draco's. "Good?" he asks, with a breathy grin. 

"You're a prat," Draco murmurs, thumb stroking at the back of Harry's hairline. His thighs ache from kneeling and being bent backward; he's just not flexible. Oh, and his wine glass has spilled all over the blanket, Pinot soaking into its fibers and the earth below. "Is this part of making it up to me?" 

"Oh, were you planning on asking to be kissed when you invited me over for horse—" Harry just grins wider against the indignant finger Draco puts against his lips. 

"Just trying to be brave," Draco mutters. "Did you really want to do that?" 

"You should know by now I don't do anything just because I'm asked, or my life would look very different now," Harry says. 

"So if I ask you to do it again..." 

"You don't think I kissed you out of pity, do you?" Harry huffs, his grin faltering. "Draco." 

"I know, gift horse and all," Draco groans. 

"I thought you said we couldn't talk about horses." 

"Will you stop ruining the moment, Harry?" 

"This is a fine moment we've been having, separate from this next one," Harry says, and he's kissing Draco again. 

It feels like a blissful eternity, kissing beneath the June sun amid the flowers where Harry and Draco met each other all over again. It's not perfect—Harry is heavy when he lays Draco down under the umbrella, and has to shift his weight until Draco can breathe again—but Draco doesn't care, especially when Harry kisses his way down from Draco's mouth to his chest, unbuttoning the top of Draco's shirt as he goes. There is, at one point, a bug that flies between their bumping noses and Draco shrieks, causing Harry to jump up and almost knock over the umbrella, but then Draco is covering his face as he laughs and Harry laughs back as he peels those hands away. 

"That's what happens in the great outdoors," Harry says, kissing each of Draco's wrists as he straddles Draco's hips; it's so thoughtlessly intimate that Draco can't breathe again, and this time not because Harry is pinning him. "Suppose I could go back to work, seeing as it's..." He casts a wandless, wordless Tempus and cringes. "Two in the afternoon." 

Well, Pansy was _almost_ right. Draco is kissed out, lips swollen and buzzing, body thrumming with arousal, and it's the afternoon. 

"What's one more day away from the office, really?" Draco murmurs, laying his hands along Harry's muscular thighs. 

"I'm going to remember that kissing chills you out," Harry chuckles. "That, or secretly you really do want to see me sacked." 

"Maybe both." Draco gives his hips as much of a roll as they can, trapped beneath Harry. "You'll have more time for this once you're unemployed." 

"Manipulative little git," Harry snorts, though Draco doesn't miss the shudder that goes through him. He rolls off of Draco and starts cleaning up the remnants of the picnic. "Help me get everything up." 

Draco doesn't want to get everything up, he wants to pull Harry back on top of him and get Harry's clothes off. Barring that, he wants to interrogate Harry on why he wanted to kiss Draco at all, because Draco knows _he's_ head over heels, so what's Harry's deal? But Harry _does_ have to go back to work, so Draco pulls himself together and works on folding up the massive umbrella. 

"When did you get this out here, anyway?" Draco asks, grunting as he winds the umbrella's strap shut. "Were you sneaking about in the fields at night or something?" 

"Nothing new," Harry says with a wicked little smile, before he shrinks the umbrella down and drops it into a bag. 

"Well, I'm going up to the manor to have an ice bath," Draco says, a bit more stiffly than he means to. _Ha. Stiffly._

Harry looks oddly somber at that. "I don't—I don't mean to leave in the middle of things, you know. I don't want to go back to work for any number of reasons, but this is certainly on the list now." The smile he gives Draco this time is weak, falling almost as soon as it's up. "It's not what I expected to happen, if you want to know. You surprised me." Harry adjusts his bag, clearing his throat. "But I'm glad you did." 

"So you wanted that to happen?" 

"Can't say I didn't hope for it," Harry says with an embarrassed shrug. "Just—you beat me to it." 

Draco's entire face lights up, devilishness curling his every feature. "You mean to say I _finally beat Harry Potter_ at something?" 

Harry barks his laughter, giving Draco a little shove. "I take it back! I'm not ever kissing you again. You're a rotten git." 

"I'll be as rotten as you like, just tell me when I'm collecting my trophy." To which Harry taps his chin, as though he's really considering it. 

"Tomorrow night. I'll have to work late tonight to make up for—well, everything," Harry says, waving at their surroundings to include them in _everything_. 

"So you can give me a time to come over and _collect_ ," Draco says with an arched brow, "but you can't do the same to see Dr. Fiddlewood?" 

Harry grimaces. "It's not the same, Draco. Seeing you doesn't have the same, uh, weight to it." 

"Choose a day. You're not even seeing her properly, she'll probably be booked up. We'd just be going to the office." Draco gives Harry's hand a stern squeeze for emphasis. 

Exhaling hard, Harry shakes his head. "Just give me a little more time, Draco." He plants a kiss on Draco's forehead, even as Draco tries not to succumb to his sinking anxiety. "Please." 

"I just want you to feel better," Draco says in a small voice, leaning into Harry. 

"I know." Harry tucks his face into Draco's shoulder for a moment, just a scant couple of inches shorter. "I'm off to the salt mines, then. Try not to do anything dangerous without me." 

"Oh, you know me, I live for danger," Draco says weakly as Harry takes a few steps back. Harry waves, and then the displaced air of his Apparition tousles Draco's hair.

☾

Draco had owled Granger and Weasley at their actual home in Chudley as soon as he'd come back from his and Harry's triumphant return to the Auror offices, and once he's returned to the manor from his picnic with Harry—or date, or whatever it was—there's a tiny, mad-looking owl beating itself senseless against the kitchen window. Draco hurls the sash up, and the owl bursts in as though its tail feathers are on fire, skidding off the kitchen table and landing by the doorway with a scrabble of talons against flagstones. Once it's stopped moving, it holds its leg up to offer a letter much too big for its little body.

"Aren't you a terror," Draco mutters, dropping owl treats on the floor rather than put his hand nearer the tiny owl than necessary. The owl scampers across the floor, gobbling them up with gusto as Draco opens the letter. 

Granger and Weasley want to know if they should have a party. A _party_. These fucking Gryffindors read words like _Harry misses you and might like to see you_ and think that means they ought to throw a _party_. Draco scoffs, glances at the little owl hunting under the cabinets for more owl treats, and summons parchment and quill. 

_Dearest Granger-Weasleys,_

_Who? When? Where? I think it's an abhorrent idea, but I bet Harry would side with you lot just because._

_D.M._

He doesn't know how to approach the owl currently hopping about the stonework, though, and honestly, he doesn't want to. He calls for Archimedes, his much statelier barn owl, who not only accepts the letter to the Granger-Weasleys, but who also seems to herd the miniature owl out with him. 

Archimedes returns with a reply (and no companion) within a few hours. Weasley seems to have penned this one, and he assures Draco that this sort of grand return to the fold is just what Harry needs, if he's feeling so much better. It's to be held at the Burrow this Friday, and as for the who, they expect to invite the full coterie of Gryffindors and sundry, it seems. Weasley's written out the whole guest list and it takes up most of the page. Draco sees Neville Longbottom on the list, and wonders if Blaise will be in attendance. Oh, he'd never hear the end of it if Blaise caught him on the arm of Harry Potter where people could see, and all before Blaise had heard it from Draco himself. Draco reminds himself to pencil in another Slytherin gathering before the party, though he may leave Greg out again. 

Granger adds, as a post script, that Draco should come, then adds another post script saying she hopes Draco had already assumed he would be in attendance. He rolls his eyes before summoning more parchment. 

_Dearest Gryffindors,_

_Fine. I will bring him. If anything starts to go even slightly wrong, I will Apparate him to the moon and you shan't see us again. I still think this is a heinous idea._

_I'll bring a bottle of wine._

_D.M._

Draco knows he's being ludicrous, acting like he's got to protect Harry from his own friends—he regrets _I will Apparate him to the moon_ just about as soon as he writes it—but there's no looking back now. He puts it aside, then sets about writing a letter to Harry. 

_Harry,_

_Your friends that you love and miss so much have had the barmy idea to host a night of alcohol and other acts of adult idiocy at the Burrow this Friday night, presuming you haven't been murdered on the job before then._

_I told them I would bring you, but I would adore it if you would tell me that under no circumstances will we be attending a party with the whole of Gryffindor's graduating class of 1998, or whatever your circle of friends is. Tell me you're much too delicate to learn, as I had to, that Neville Longbottom is dating Blaise (Zabini, I know you barely remember any Slytherin who isn't me from our school days) while also dodging a dangerous arse-puncher of a five year old and handling your alcohol. Draco, you might say, I'm in no state to get up to my old stupid bawdy Gryffindor ways, let's have a quiet night in like the old people we truly are. _

_It's up to you._

_Yours,  
Draco_

"To the Granger-Weasleys first, then to Harry," Draco instructs Archimedes, petting his lovely white gold feathers and feeding him a strip of jerky. "And if that git Weasley tries to read Harry's letter, you have my permission to bite him as hard as you like." And then, "Don't bite the children. Just avoid them." And off Archimedes goes. 

Draco spends the rest of the night pretending he's not waiting for Archimedes' return, reading the same page in a book on the history of Dark Magic in fourth century China that was so interesting when he purchased it a year ago, and fixing himself a dinner that he both undersalts and burns in his distraction. When Archimedes does come back, Draco throws his hands up to say, "Oh, thank Salazar," and is on his feet in seconds to let the owl in. 

_Draco,_

_You're right, it does sound like a barmy idea. And who's barmier than me? Besides, you'll love horrifying all my friends._

_See you tomorrow night._

_Harry_

Draco can't get the bad feeling out from under his skin; it feels like too much, too soon. But he lets Archimedes out for his nightly hunt, and tells himself it's just that _he's_ socially anxious as an adult and he doesn't want the only people he really knows at a party to be the guy who knows everyone, and Blaise Zabini. That's all it is. He goes to bed still arguing the point with himself; Harry is an adult who can feel out his own limits, even though past evidence has shown that his idea of limits is locking everyone out of his life for years at a time. It'll be fine. Draco is the problem. It'll be _fine_. 

The whole next morning is spent in a similar dither, with Draco burning two consecutive cups of tea before telling himself he doesn't _need_ caffeine to be productive and setting himself a lighter read than last night's attempt. Then he tells himself he's perfectly capable of focusing long enough to brew one sodding cup of tea, he _is_ , and he manages through sheer force of will, staring the tea down so he won't miss the perfect moment to remove it from the water. 

The afternoon is spent almost completely in the wardrobe, trying to find the perfect ensemble that both reminds Harry that Draco holds himself to high standards, as well as conveying that he's not too posh to enjoy himself. There's a great deal of grumbling. 

And then he's on the steps to Grimmauld Place, dressed in cropped trousers, a dark beetle green shirt picked out with silver thread, and charcoal grey robes with cape sleeves. Casual by his standards, and yet he's trying not to sweat through it all. 

"Well, aren't you just a prince," Harry cackles as he throws the door open. He's wearing an apron over a T-shirt and jeans, a stained wooden spoon still clutched in one hand. 

"I'll just leave, shall I?" Draco says with a scowl, and makes a great show of turning around to do just that. 

"Oh, come here, you sensitive loon," Harry says with another low chuckle. "I haven't made all this food just to have it sit because you got a bit stroppy." 

"I'm not stroppy," Draco sniffs as he passes Harry to enter the house. He notes, yet again, that the mess hasn't returned. 

"So I owled Ron and Hermione after I got your letter," Harry says as he shuts the door behind Draco. 

"Oh?" Draco says, shoulders suddenly tight as he does his best to sound disinterested. 

"Apparently, if anything goes wrong at the party, you're going to Apparate me to the moon, and we won't be seen again." Harry vanishes into the kitchen, and Draco twists his anxious hands together until his knuckles crack. He follows Harry in despite his trepidation. 

The kitchen smells amazing. Draco expects to be told off about how Draco can trust Harry's friends, at least when it comes to Harry's wellbeing. Harry wouldn't be out of line to say it, either, Draco had _known_ that line about the moon was so idiotic and he'd put it to parchment anyway. Maybe the admonishment would come bundled together with hints that Harry's outgrowing Draco now that he's got his real friends back, never mind that Harry's _kissed him,_ never mind that Harry's invited him over the very next day and seems to be cooking him dinner. 

"Bit protective," Harry remarks as he throws open the oven door and pulls on a pair of oven mitts. He pulls a shepherd's pie from within, the whipped potato top crispy and golden. "Can't say it doesn't make me feel special," Harry goes on, and Draco's so surprised he lets it show on his face, giving his head a little shake. "Never been to the moon before, though." 

"I don't doubt it's chilly," Draco says, and it comes out uncertain, as though he's really asking for a weather report on a celestial body. He stays near the doorway to the kitchen, watching Harry finish pulling dinner together. "I thought you didn't like protective." 

Harry pauses, two massive forks dug into a deep bowl of salad. He wrinkles his nose. "Is that what I said?" 

"You said something about how you like that I don't worry at you, I believe, or make you feel like you're made of glass." Draco remembers it word for word, seared into his memory banks as though with fire. "I didn't mean for you to hear that stupid line about the moon." He puts his hand over his eyes, sighing. 

"Well, as ever, you're a pedant," Harry chuckles, and returns to tossing the salad with its dressing. "I dunno, it didn't feel quite like that to me. Besides, you're loads more nervous than I am." 

"I'm not nervous!" Draco squawks, voice breaking on the last word. Harry breaks out into full-on laughter. "I'm perfectly calm, it's you and your stupid volatile emotions that ought to be nervous!" 

"Oh, come off it, an entire paragraph telling me to tell you I'm too much of a mental invalid to go to a party? Draco, please." 

"I've got nothing to be nervous about," Draco says, his hands on the verge of breaking each other. "I'm an impeccable dresser, I have exquisite tastes, and I..." He trails off. "Well, what else could I need, anyway?" 

"You're right, you're a gorgeous man with strange, scholarly hobbies and a picky eater, you'll do fine," Harry says as he collects bowls and puts them in Draco's hands. 

"Oh, sod off," Draco mutters, attributing the flush he can feel on his face to the general heat of the kitchen. He does as he was silently asked and goes to set the table. 

Harry floats the shepherd's pie in its heavy dish out into the dining room, the salad bowl following suit before Harry himself emerges from the kitchen, pulling off his apron. He looks soft and comfortable, and for a moment Draco wants to forget dinner and kiss him everywhere he can reach, right now. Instead he sits, because surely that's too much, and anyway, Harry went to all this trouble. 

The dishes set themselves down with a thud and a clink, and instead of sitting down as well, Harry stands over Draco, gripping the back of his chair as he looks down. Draco meets his eyes, lost. 

"You know, I _do_ like you," Harry says, gently. 

"Why?" Draco asks, finally cleaving to the heart of the matter. 

"Why?" Harry echoes, frowning. "Because I do." And when Draco keeps staring at him, he seems to realize that's not enough. "Because you've helped me, a great deal. Because you've helped me come back to myself, when I thought there was no myself left." Harry's frown deepens. "Because I don't think you think you deserve the same, and I think you do. And... I want to be the one who gives that to you." He runs tender fingers through Draco's silken hair. 

"And then? What comes after that?" Draco hates the question even before he's finished saying it, knows there are very few answers he'll like, but he knows he has to ask it. 

Harry shrugs. "I dunno. Anything you like, I suppose." And as Draco's heart begins its awful plummet, he goes on, "We could go on holiday, after I've quit my horrid job. Spend a little bit more than a few hours in the great outdoors together." 

"And kiss another bug? You're mad," Draco says with a healthy injection of disgust, but he finds himself smiling uncontrollably. 

"I'm not going to toss you aside just because you've helped me feel like a human being again, Draco." Harry kisses Draco's high forehead, and Draco shivers with the electric spike that shoots down his spine. "I really, truly, sincerely enjoy you, and the person I am around you." Then he's tipping Draco's face up, bending to kiss him properly. 

"Well," Draco says breathlessly, once Harry's straightened up and started portioning the food, "heaven forfend our Hogwarts selves ever hear you say that. I hope you haven't got any Time Turners hanging about." 

Harry arches his brows as he lays a healthy slab of shepherd's pie onto Draco's plate. Draco expects him to wax nostalgic about their rivalry, but there's no misty-eyed recollection happening behind those serious green eyes. Draco swallows, reading everything he needs to in that one look. The train. Draco's every awful word to Harry and both his best friends. The train, again, but different. The cabinet. _Sectumsempra._ The Fiendfyre. The sum of their terrible, tumultuous relationship as children. Draco wonders if Harry can read his eyes as clearly, if he can see Draco's self-loathing, his ardent teenage desire for someone he taught himself to hate. 

"You don't have to keep doing that," Harry says, quite simply, and drops a pile of salad next to the shepherd's pie. 

"I know," Draco mumbles. He does. Dr. Fiddlewood would agree. "I'm sorry." 

"I know, too," Harry replies, and he kisses Draco again, reassuring but brief. 

The shepherd's pie is hearty and flavorful, though the salad is overdressed and basic. Draco comments on the former, and Harry beams. Harry's bought a Bordeaux from just a few years ago, and Draco can't help but say something about its age, but it just makes Harry snicker. "Oh, not that bit with the wine barreler again," Draco groans, which only makes Harry laugh louder. 

Draco wishes, he really does, that he wasn't so insecure, that he could just take Harry's affection as it comes and enjoy it for what it is. He should already feel more special than he deserves just for Harry kissing him when asked. Dr. Fiddlewood would remind him not for the first or last time, that _he_ shapes who he is, more than anyone else; he chooses the person he is. 

So he chooses to enjoy himself. He chooses to even enjoy Harry's wet salad, because Harry made it for him, and that is enough. Draco gives himself over to stupid chatter, which turns to school nostalgia anyway once Harry asks if he meant it about Longbottom and Blaise. Draco lets the cheap wine make him feel pliant and buzzy, because he thinks about Harry going out of his way to choose a wine that Draco might like and he melts with how horribly in love he is. Oh, he's so far gone. 

There is no sex. Draco's fantasized about it, there's no mistake about that, but if he's resolving to enjoy Harry, then he's going to savor things. "You have work in the morning," he says as he adjusts his robes, and flicks his half-lidded gaze over to Harry to let his words be transparent. _Not yet, but soon enough._ Harry bids him farewell by pinning Draco to the wall, kissing him so passionately Draco considers staying the night and doing something about their mutual erections after all. 

But Draco Apparates back off to the manor, feeling as heady as he is elated.

☾

Friday arrives sooner than Draco anticipated, and Harry is right; Draco is a massive knot of dread. He worries Harry will have a meltdown, because Harry has been far too confident about this whole debacle, but he worries, too, that he will show up in this den of do-gooders and say all sorts of horrible shit, alienating himself from Harry's friends forever because of his awful personality. He doesn't even know what he might say, but the surprise is half the fun.

"My friends will be happy to see me, and not angry at me, and I will have a good time," Harry says to himself as they prepare to Apparate to the Burrow together. He's said this little mantra a few times since Draco's arrived to his house, as though he's not wholly convinced. 

"They might be a little angry at you," Draco says, not unreasonably, he doesn't think. "But not at a party." 

"That's not helpful," Harry snaps, choosing and pulling on a different T-shirt. Draco pretends he's not eyeing Harry up every time he changes his mind about what shirt to wear, but also they all look the same to him. 

"I mean, you don't expect them to just blandly smile at you and let you pick up where you all left off, do you? I don't think that's in either of them." For once Draco has managed to pick a single outfit and stick with it, so he sits on the bed, watching Harry have a sartorial crisis. "'Harry, mate, bloody hell, don't ever do that to us again,'" Draco says in a deep, Weasley-like voice, followed by a much higher, "'Harry James Potter, if you ever try to abandon all your friends again, I will—'" Draco pauses, unsure how Granger might threaten someone without slapping them. 

"How do you know my middle name?" Harry wants to know, pulling out the front of his T-shirt in both hands to inspect it. "And Hermione would threaten to reveal I haven't got an Apparition license, if you're trying to do an impression of her." 

"Oh, saw it in the Prophet," Draco says airily, and quickly because he doesn't actually remember. Just another Harry fact he's absorbed and obsessively held onto over the years. "And—wait, I remember you being in those stupid Apparition classes we had to take. You never got your license?" 

"Well, ran out of time because of, you know, the war," Harry says, frowning at the faded design on his shirt, "and then there didn't seem to be a point. I could do it, and nobody was checking, so why bother?" 

"What's wrong with that shirt?" Draco asks, because it's easier than talking about how it was his actions that interrupted Harry's timeline for something so mundane as an Apparition license. 

"You know what?" Harry lets go of his shirt hem and smooths his hands down it, then does the same to his head, his hair vanishing in favor of stubble. "Nothing. Nothing at all. Let's go." 

They arrive at the Burrow with twin soft cracks. The whole place is lit up, warm and inviting and already full of the hum of many conversations. The front door is wide open, an invitation to any passerby. For a moment, Harry takes a step back, just squeezing Draco's hand, who squeezes it right back. 

"Harry!" Granger's voice rings out across the dark lawn, and she comes pelting out of the house to hurl her entire body at Harry in a tight embrace. Harry's breath gets knocked out of him with a big _oof_ , forced into taking another step back, but he's grinning before his face vanishes into her mass of hair, hugging her right back. Then Granger holds Harry at arm's length so she can angle her face back and shout, "Ron! Everyone! Harry's here!" 

The Burrow's front door erupts with loud, smiling people. Harry's name is echoed over and over, each person fighting for their chance to hug him or clap him on the back. Draco ends up pushed away by the sheer size of the crowd. He knew, really, this is what it would be like, and he's happy that Harry has so many people who love him. The Weasley matriarch in particular cuts down the middle of the pack and yanks Harry down into a soft but squeezing gran kind of hug, and Harry looks like he's on the verge of tears, from what little Draco can see of him now. 

He considers just leaving. Yes, he was invited, more or less. Yes, Harry had asked him to please come because he grounded Harry. But Harry looks quite grounded amid his friends and adopted family, and Draco isn't part of that family. 

"Oh," Harry's voice says, suddenly loud, "and Draco's here." 

The crowd falls silent, all heads swiveling to look at Draco, who suddenly wants nothing more than to be a blade of grass. Small, innocent, certainly not under the scrutiny of what feels like a thousand Weasleys and their cohorts. 

"I've brought wine," Draco says in a quavering voice, and holds up a massive liter bottle of Pinot Noir. 

"He's brought wine!" an unidentified Weasley shouts, and a cheer lights up the majority of the crowd. Draco gets folded into the group by several hands, one pair of which takes the wine from him, and the only face he recognizes in that moment is Granger's, who looks at him with a rueful smirk. 

The Burrow looks much the same as the last time Draco was here, but even denser with all the bodies packed into it. The noise levels are off the charts, and Draco realizes the door was open not just as a symbol of open-heartedness or whatnot, but because it's unbelievably stuffy in here, the windows thrown wide as well. He spots his wine bottle on a table packed full of booze, towering over the lot, and not far from it is a kitchen table that rivals the Hogwarts house tables for length, piled high with food. 

"Fancy seeing you here," Blaise's voice murmurs into Draco's ear from behind, and Draco nearly jumps out of his skin. 

"Blaise!" Oh, fuck, he'd forgotten to actually _tell_ Blaise—and Pansy—about his... Harry thing, whatever it might be called. "What are you doing here?" 

"Why, I'm on the arm of my beau, of course," Blaise says, arching a single brow. "You silly man." He gestures behind him, to where Longbottom is pouring two drinks at the booze table. "What are _you_ doing here?" 

Draco wants to draw himself up and tell Blaise he's doing the same, but he doesn't know what to call Harry besides _man who kissed me two days in a row before he had a lot of work to do, and now here we are_. "I'm with Harry," he says in a low voice, one only Blaise and his bat ears can hear. 

Blaise frowns before his eyes go wide in realization, his mouth puckered with surprise, and then he's grinning so fiendishly Draco wishes he'd just said he was a gatecrasher. He could have at least worded it some other way. " _With_ Harry?" Blaise says, the tip of his tongue waggling between his teeth as his eyebrows go up and down. "Oh, I knew it. Pansy's going to lose her mind, we both thought—oh, Draco, who knew you had it in you?" Blaise's cackle is positively evil, and Draco wants to be irritated, but frankly, he's enjoying Blaise's surreptitious congratulations. 

"Don't shout it out," Draco says, but he's starting to grin, too. He's got Harry in his sights, watching him talk animatedly with Weasley, Granger, and Luna Lovegood. "It's only been since Monday." 

"So you two haven't—?" Blaise makes an obscene gesture with both hands, and Draco slaps them down immediately. 

"Stop that!" 

"You really are a Pureblood," Blaise laughs, though he doesn't make the gesture again. "What, afraid all the other grownups in the room will hear us talking about SEX?" Blaise bellows this last word, and it takes every ounce of Draco's self-restraint, every second he's ever spent in Dr. Fiddlewood's office, to not tear Blaise's head off with his bare hands. But the room is too loud for anyone to have noticed Blaise raising his voice, and Draco exhales his relief. 

"Really, though," Blaise says, "I'm happy for you, even though you should have told me and Pansy before this party." 

It's as close as Blaise will ever get, and Draco loves him that way. "What about Greg?" 

"What about Greg?" Blaise snorts. "He'll just ask which of you's the woman and not understand why that's not polite conversation." 

"Oh, he's not that bad," Draco says, but he knows Blaise is probably right. Harry's spotted him now, making eye contact across the room. "I'm going to go see what Harry's up to." 

"I'm going to go collect my drink from my favorite botanist, then," Blaise says. "I'm coming to the manor next week with Pansy and you've no choice in the matter." 

"Oh, fine." They share a quick embrace, and Draco makes his way over to Harry. 

The next few hours are shockingly fine. For all that he brought the biggest bottle of alcohol in the room, Draco nurses a single glass of it all the while, with the notion that if he does need to make an emergency Apparition to the moon, he'll need his sobriety for it. He mostly lurks near Harry's conversations, contributing little except his presence. Draco doesn't know what to say to any of these people, really, but Harry has become a regular chatterbox anyway. He keeps touching Harry throughout the night, just a hand on his back or fingers sliding across the back of his hand, to remind him he's here. 

Everyone is so happy to see Harry, though, that they keep filling his glass. Wine, lager, Firewhiskey, some vodka from a bottle with Viktor Krum's smarmy face on it, all of it keeps pouring into Harry's glass and then down Harry's throat. He's so happy to see his friends, in turn, that he never says no, just an increasingly slurred "Cheers!" that gets returned by the friend doing the pouring. 

Three hours into the party, Harry's angry voice slices through the party, and a stunned hush falls across the room. Draco doesn't know what Seamus Finnegan's said to set Harry off, but he looks blanched with surprise, holding up his hands placatingly. "I didn't mean—" Seamus is saying when Draco pushes his way over. 

Draco doesn't wait. Harry's strong body is tensed, rooting him to the floor with rage, but when Draco's fingers close around his wrist he lets himself be taken. Amid a jumble of _What's going on?_ and _Harry, mate, where are you going?_ and _What's that Malfoy doing?_ Draco drags Harry to the front door of the Burrow and out onto the lawn. 

"He said—" Harry begins, anger still suffusing his features, but Draco holds a finger to Harry's lips, silencing him. He pulls Harry around to the side of the house. Harry's hair charm has broken, falling soft and messy around his face. 

"Tell me after this," Draco says, holding up one of Harry's hands. Circles in his palm. Harry takes deep, aggressive breaths at first, still making attempts to tell Draco just what Seamus had said that has him shaking so badly, but every time Draco shushes him again, presses his circles a little firmer. It takes time, Draco’s thumb sore after ten solid minutes, but Harry’s breathing evens out at last, in time with the circles Draco is drawing. 

"He made a joke about how I missed Hugo’s birth," Harry says, closing his eyes. "Said I must be planning another breakdown in time to miss the next baby." He shakes his head. "What a stupid thing to be so angry about." 

"It’s not stupid, but you're drunk," Draco says gently, though it seems Harry's fit has sobered him up a good deal. "And you weren't ready for this." 

"I wanted to be." 

"I know." An echo of Harry's own _I know._ Draco puts his forehead to Harry's. 

"Are you going to Apparate us to the moon?" Harry says with a sad little chuckle. 

"No, you stink of alcohol and I don't think they have showers on the moon yet," Draco says in return. "How about I just take you to your bed and we'll take our holiday to the moon later?" 

"Can't tell you what a letdown this is," Harry says, canting his face up to kiss Draco, small and chaste. 

"Harry—" Weasley's voice. Ron Weasley, Draco clarifies to himself, since there are so many Weasleys roaming the party. Both Harry and Draco snap their heads in time to see Ron Weasley looking as though he's walked in on his parents having sex. "I, er—" 

"Alright, we'll be off now!" Draco squeaks, and Apparates them back to Twelve Grimmauld Place. 

Once they've come back to Harry's house, Draco rubs Harry's back as he vomits up most of what he consumed at the party, then pulls off his shoes, socks and jeans to put him to bed. Harry tries to wrap his legs around Draco and pull him in for something hot and heavy, but Draco admonishes him with a firm, "You're drunk," and goes off into the corner to borrow one of Harry's shirts to sleep in. He doesn't even think about what he's doing until he's got the shirt halfway over his head, filling his nose with Harry's scent, and he pauses for a moment to just really see himself. Wearing Harry's things, sleeping in Harry's bed, taking care of Harry. He loves all of it. 

By the time he comes to bed, Harry's out cold, no help to Draco in getting his heavy legs under the coverlet. Draco wiggles underneath the covers beside Harry, and spends an embarrassing minute trying to decide whether to keep to himself, be Harry's big spoon, or some awkward pose in between before Harry wakes up just enough to roll on top of Draco. Well, that's sorted, he supposes, and checks again that his wand is on the bedside table before letting himself drift off. When the tracking spell finishes, it'll be Draco's wand that gets the first signal, then the alarm at the Auror offices. 

_He dreams of midnight blue fields under a sky so thick with stars it looks like a daytime blue. He dreams of Harry, not murder. Harry, shining disk of the moon making a relief around his dark curls, kissing Draco as though it's the only thing he wants to do in the world. Harry touches Draco's face and the midnight blue becomes yellow, the sun blazing overhead, bigger and brighter than it has ever been._

There's a bright light in the room, making Draco squint as he wakes from its brilliance. Not from the window, because it’s still dead of night, but hanging over his wand on the bedside table. Harry is too deep in his drunk-sleep to be affected by it, apparently, still snoring away next to Draco, but Draco swings his legs out from under the coverlet and reaches for his wand as he sits up. 

The tracking spell is complete. It's found the source. 

Draco looks at Harry, tender and peaceful under the bedclothes he's kicked into a twisted mess. Harry would want to go with him. Is supposed to go with him. He's not just the savior of the wizarding world, he's Head Auror, and one of the most powerful wizards alive, besides. 

Draco also doesn't doubt Harry would be a massive target. He sweeps dark hair from Harry's forehead to kiss him there, right on the lightning bolt scar, and gets up to pull his clothes on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just one more chapter to go! thank you so much to everyone who's read and commented; thank you to my cheerleaders on discord! if you have any particular hopes, dreams, or predictions about the final chapter of this fic, please don't hesitate to drop them in the comments—that's one of my favorite things in the world.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: this chapter features some torture, and blood is spilled. 
> 
> i'm so happy to finally post this the end of this fic! it's been wonderful writing it, and i could not have finished this chapter without the beta expertise of ThestralHouseofBlack, Saphira, and Neev. i've been nervous about every part of this fic, from writing third person longfic for the first time in a long time, to the pacing and character development, and i have to thank all my cheerleaders from the start—my betas for this chapter, as well as spacehubsands, donnarafiki, gem♊️, crowry, and sunmoonandspoon—for keeping me on track and never letting me doubt myself. 
> 
> here's hoping this is the ending you've been waiting for!

Draco doesn't recognize where the tracking spell has taken him. Wherever he is is lightless and oppressive, the air stale and swampy. He lights his wand in silence. 

A tiny room. A basement room, by the looks of the boarded-over windows near the ceiling. One door, behind which he hopes there are stairs. A wall that doesn't match its neighbors, haphazard and cheap-looking. Nothing in the room itself, he notes, careful anyway not to take any steps just yet. And on the floor—

Blood. 

He knows what blood looks like after it's dried where it spilled. It's an old stain, nowhere close to fresh, but it's big, as though its living container was allowed to bleed out into a big pool. He suppresses the urge to retch. 

Nothing's jumped out at him yet, so he takes one step toward the odd wall out, waits to die, and takes another. Still alive. He heads toward the wall at a brisker pace, inspecting it despite not knowing what he ought to look for. The edges don't look properly joined to the other walls. When he knocks on it, it sounds less like a wall and more like a door. Draco frowns, and taps his wand against it, murmuring spells to investigate it. 

The wall produces a door after the third spell. Draco presses his ear to it, hears nothing stirring behind it, and opens the new door slowly. Here he finds the rest of the basement room, the walls lined with rusted chains that end in shackles. The floor is far more stained in here, though the stains don't have the same look as blood. 

If this is the source of Venari Virtute, whatever was at work here is long gone, and Draco's tracking spell is a failure. Back to square one, with more people likely to die while Draco struggles to find a new angle. He huffs through his nose in frustration. 

Maybe it's upstairs. He leaves the fetid hidden prison, still stalking as carefully as he can manage toward the door he thinks should lead to the rest of the house. A quick tap of his wand and a whispered _Alohomora_ unlock it, and then, yes, there are stairs going up. He keeps his feet to the sides where the steps are least likely to creak. He feels pretty successful in sneaking around, at least—maybe he ought to apply for Harry's job once he's quit. Head Auror Malfoy indeed. 

The house above the basement isn't in much better shape. The air is much more breathable, if nothing else, but the walls and scant furniture bear the marks of a big fight. Chunks taken out of door frames, legs blasted off end tables, holes gouged into walls. Smears of long-dried blood painted over all of it. 

He doubts his spell less, suddenly. 

Draco opens a door to find a bedroom behind it. The bedclothes are haphazard, thrown aside as if its last occupant had left bed in a hurry. The room has a strange smell to it that unnerves Draco—like stepping into someone else's home for the first time. Like someone lives here, in this room. He tenses all the tighter, feeling so wound up he might pull himself apart. But here, on the table in the corner—

Books Draco recognizes. Books on foul, evil magic, too terrible to just be called Dark Magic; on ancient spells that predate wands; a particularly esoteric book on sources of magic in the world. These were all in Malfoy Manor's library when Draco was a child, and he never touched them, even when he was young and stupid enough to think they were cool. Draco tucks his wand into his robes and runs a finger down a leather book cover, shuddering; it's nearly dustless, as is the table it sits upon. 

Pain blooms, sudden and stinging, in the middle of his back, lancing up and down his spine as his body goes nerveless. Draco collapses in a twisted heap on the disgusting floor, watching a pair of feet swish under too-short robes toward him. A voice far above mutters something incomprehensible, and Draco is suddenly blind, his eyes wide and taking in nothing. He can't speak. 

Panic fills him, his breath coming fast through his soundless mouth as a pair of strong hands take him by the ankles. There seems to be little effort on the part of his assailant as he's dragged along the floor, the sides of his ragdoll body scraping against door frames as they take a turn out of the bedroom. 

His head bumps each step as he's dragged down stairs. Downstairs. Into the basement with the blood stained floor. His attacker doesn't seem to be in any kind of hurry, so at least each thump of the back of his head is slow, less painful than it could be—the only positive he can find in this moment. 

Draco is so stupid. He's probably going to die, all because he was feeling soppy about protecting Harry, a trained Auror so competent in his field that he was promoted to the top of the ladder. He's going to die in a rank basement in Merlin knows where, and no one will find his body, and his mother will have to come back to England a second time in as many months to hold a second funeral. An empty casket funeral for her stupid, pigheaded son so concerned with bravery he forgot how useful cowardice is. 

His attacker finally stops. The same hands that were dragging him sits him up neatly against a wall, arms at his sides, feet together. The same voice that blinded him whispers, and suddenly his eyes are full of daggers as light re-enters them. He squeezes his eyelids, and the voice laughs. 

"You never could take a little pain." 

Draco forces his eyes open. As they adjust to the light cast by a single lit wand, his body exploding with pins and needles as feeling returns, he focuses on the figure in front of him. 

Long, thick flaxen hair. A square face to match squared shoulders. And a strong-featured face, with pale eyes under wispy brows. A heavy wand clasped in a muscled hand, pointed at him. 

"Hello, Draco," says Griselda Yaxley. "What a surprise _you_ are." 

"You?" Draco croaks, coughing as words return to him. 

Griselda smirks, pacing a wide, loose semi-circle around him. "It's funny, isn't it? I remember you as a coward, definitely not anyone I'd ever imagine investigating the 21st century's biggest magical crime, and you—I imagine all you remember me as is a little girl who didn't get to do anything fun in the war." 

There are so many things Draco could say. _There is nothing 'fun' about war. You were a little sociopath. You were lucky._ Instead, he coughs again, and tries to clear his throat. He's still too weak to stand. 

"But look at you now! Draco Malfoy the Squib, breaking into dens of evil and solving the case!" Griselda claps, though she never lets go of her wand. It looks like her father's wand. He thinks it actually _is_ her father's wand. "I bet you feel so smart. Like you did something competent, for once." 

But she sighs. "The thing is, Draco, you're just not exciting to me. I thought—well, honestly, I thought that if I made a real problem, I'd get _the_ Harry Potter on my doorstep, not some skinny sop pulling his nose out of a book long enough to get himself killed." Griselda reverses directions, starting her slow meander around the basement again. 

"You'll never get Harry," Draco growls, not because of anything he knows, but because he wants her to feel unsuccessful. It's all he has. 

Griselda bursts out laughing. "Harry, is it? Are you on a first name basis with the Savior? You, son of Useless Malfoy? Oh, that’s funny." She shakes her head, still chuckling. "Do you think he might come find you? I hope so." 

"He's not coming!" Draco shouts. "You're not getting your hands on him!" 

"You're awfully worked up," Griselda murmurs, lowering her eyelids coquettishly as she takes particularly languorous strides, and Draco feels nauseous at the implication of her guess. "But I mean—I'm not Voldemort. I don't actually care, you see, if I get Harry bloody Potter. I'd have to be as stupid as he was to focus on one person like that." 

"Just kill me if you're going to." Draco flexes his hands beneath the slight spread of his robes; if he can just get his grip strength back, if he can be quick enough, then he can grab for his wand and disarm her. 

"Shut up, Malfoy, I'm explaining my evil plot to you." She twirls her wand in her hand, and Draco watches it carefully, waiting for the curse he'll have to try and dodge. "You have no idea how boring it gets without stupid underlings. That's probably why Voldemort had so many, because he was sad and stupid and lonely." 

Draco cannot reconcile any of those words with the Dark Lord. _Sad and stupid and lonely._

"If I kill Harry Potter, that's great. Everyone will act all pathetic about it and lose all morale, _and_ I'll have all his power. If I don't kill Harry Potter, though, who cares? I'm killing people anyway." 

_I would kill everyone. I would kill everyone so fast._ A promise made by a child playing with sharp objects. The only person in all the world unimpressed by the speed and volume at which Voldemort, the most powerful and ruthless Dark Wizard of his time, had killed people. 

"Why?" Draco asks, in a voice he doesn't mean to be so small. 

"What?" Griselda pauses. 

"Why are you doing this?" Draco's mouth is dry. He's screaming inside himself that it doesn't matter what fucking intel he gathers if he's just going to die, but he's asked it already, and why _not_ satisfy his curiosity before she kills him? 

She frowns. "Aren't you the scholar? Didn't you figure out what it is my spell does? I'm draining magic from Britain's most powerful witches and wizards." 

"But—to what end? V-Voldemort—" Draco doesn't mean to trip over the name, and Griselda laughs, cold and unkind. "He had a goal for all the terrible things he did. He wanted a wizarding world of only Purebloods." 

Griselda shrugs. "That's part of why he failed. But sometimes, Draco, people just die. There's no rhyme or reason." Her eyes harden, her mouth a grim line. "It doesn't matter who they were before. Maybe they're a parent. Perhaps they're a hard worker, loyal, powerful. Everyone's the same when they die." 

"I don't understand." 

"Fuck the wizarding world!" Griselda shouts, rounding on Draco with her wand held up, and she radiates so much aggressive magic he feels it pressing him to the wall. "Everyone's going to die! Then there'll be no more caring about who's a Pureblood, who's not, who followed _who_ in a war that could have been _so much bloodier!"_ Within a few angry strides Griselda is upon Draco, hauling him up by the collar and jamming the point of her wand into his throat. "And you're not going to fucking stop me, of _all_ people, Draco Malfoy!" 

" _Expelliarmus!_ " 

Griselda's thick wand goes spinning through the air, clattering against the poured concrete floor on the other side of the room. Draco clutches his wand in one shaking but purposeful fist, having pulled it from his robes as Griselda pulled him up. Griselda watches the wand fly from her hand with wide eyes, but when she turns back to him, her face is twisted with a snarling grin that fills Draco with terror. 

"You didn't think I actually needed that, did you?" she cackles, and she puts her empty wand hand to Draco's throat. "Or did you forget that I have the magic of _every_ victim of Venari Virtute at my disposal?" Griselda squeezes, just enough to make the threat real, and Draco wheezes. He holds up his wand again, trying to think through the pain and fear of the spell he can cast nonverbally to get her off him, and she laughs again before hurling him to the floor by the neck. 

"Oh, Draco," she says, with a sympathetic click of her tongue. "How long has it been since you used your magic? Fifteen years?" She waves, and Draco is pulled by an unseen force into the center of the room, right onto the massive blood stain. "I think I've gotten everything I wanted to say out of my system, and it's clear you really are alone. Let's begin your death, shall we?" 

Draco gasps as he pushes himself up on his arms, holding up his wand. He doesn't know why he still has it; Griselda had every opportunity to pull it from his hand when she had him by the throat, and even now, she could disarm him any time she wanted. " _Reduc—_ " 

The same unseen force of Griselda's wandless, wordless magic flattens him before he can finish the incantation. She _giggles_. "Tell me, Draco, should I make this personal for you? Or would a run of the mill grisly death work for you?" 

"Personal?" Draco spits, struggling against the weight of her magic. "That's a laugh." 

Her Legilimency hits him like an explosion. Griselda rifles through his head carelessly, painfully, flipping from one memory to the next at such a rapid speed that Draco feels like his brain is being pureed. But she finds his kiss with Harry in the field, and Draco wants to rip out her eyes, even knowing that doesn't stop her from having seen it. She finds all his desire for Harry, all the casual little thoughts he always thought he'd keep to himself as a skilled Occlumens trained by Voldemort's favored Death Eater. 

She finds Draco, sixteen, head bent over the sink. She finds him whirling to face Harry Potter, an Unforgivable already forming on his lips, because he hates himself, because he _must_ hate Harry, because he's a coward who has the wrong idea of what it is to be brave. And she finds him crashing to the floor as Harry counters him, blood pouring from the deep gashes in his chest and belly into the water that floods the tiles. 

Griselda tears herself out of Draco's memories with a grin, leaving Draco dizzy and pale on the floor. "Oh, it's so much better than I'd hoped for," she says. "Up, Draco!" Her magic yanks him up like a marionette, pulling at his limbs with sharp fingers, his head lolling before he forces himself to stand straight. 

"Now, see," she continues, "Voldemort was obsessed with being powerful, but he did it by depending on people being afraid. People don't always stay afraid, or people become afraid of something else; you can't rely on people. There are only two things you can rely on." She holds up two fingers, as if she thinks Draco needs help counting. "Yourself, and death. So now, people are dying, and I'm powerful, and I have _such_ power and control that I can do this." And she jerks her hand as if flicking water off her fingers. 

At first, all Draco feels is a quick sting on his cheek, and the warm, slow trickle of blood sliding down his jaw. Griselda flicks her hand again, and a second sting hits his other cheek. "Just a little bit, at first," she says, voice as soft as her expression, before it breaks into a mocking smile. "But do you recognize the spell?" 

Draco spits. His mother would be horrified. 

"No?" Griselda sneers, and she holds up her hand. "Let's turn it up a little." Her hand slices through the air, and Draco gasps as pain sears its way across his chest, cutting a precise line through his robes and shirt. Warmth soaks the fabric of both garments. "What about now? Is it familiar? Put the pieces together, Draco, I know you think you're so smart these days." 

His wand hand tears forward from Griselda's hold. " _Stup—_ " 

Griselda's next cut sends him staggering back, and he eats the rest of the incantation as he gasps again, and then again, blood oozing from his belly. The pain brings him to his knees, the cut deeper than its predecessor, but still he holds up his wand, pointed haphazardly in Griselda's direction. " _Reduct—_ " 

He's so close this time, and yet Griselda slashes him again, across the shoulder of his wand arm. This time there is no gasping, only a cry of pain as Draco nearly loses his grip on his wand; Griselda laughs, full-throated and delighted. She doesn't even let him try to get another hex in, sweeping her hand low to slice at Draco's thighs. 

And as Draco is panting, howling through his teeth because he won't, he _won't_ scream for her again, as he curls in on himself with his wand held in both hands, blood slicking his palms—Griselda approaches. Her magic pulls him back by his short hair, and she grabs at his left arm to yank his sleeve up, popping buttons and tearing fabric as she does. His faded Dark Mark lies underneath. 

"You were never any fun when I was a child," Griselda leers. "Let's call this whole exercise 'making up for lost time,' how about?" She presses a finger to the Dark Mark. 

Draco screams. Blood seeps up from every accursed line of the Dark Mark, his arm flayed in the shape of Voldemort's snake-tongued skull. Griselda presses her finger harder, right over the skull's forehead, and the tattoo carves itself again, blood flowing faster and darker, and Draco keeps screaming. His throat is raw with it, his face wet not just with blood but with tears, too. 

"Harry Potter won't find you, but maybe I'll keep your body in stasis for a little while," Griselda hisses through her awful grin, "and bring it to him so I can show him all the ribbons I cut you into, before I kill him too! A lovers' reunion!" She throws her head back, her laugh feral and loud, a hyena before it makes its kill. 

When Draco closes his eyes, all he can see is Harry as he's come to know him, soft and open in moonlight, happy and loving in sunlight. Harry who cooks for him, Harry who likes him, Harry who casually admits he fantasizes about taking Draco on holiday. Harry who fixes him a friendly romantic picnic and silently hopes Draco will kiss him for it. Harry who shares his fears with Draco, Harry who opens himself to Draco's fears in return. 

Draco won't let Griselda get to Harry. Draco won't let himself die. 

He will be brave. For Harry. 

For himself. 

Draco forces himself to raise his wand, through the vertigo of blood loss, through the fog of the agony of all the places his body has been torn open. Griselda is already raising her hand in turn, probably to hit him with another taste of her exacting Sectumsempra, but he opens his mouth for the incantation anyway. 

" _Confr—_ " 

She brings her hand down. Draco is sent head over heels, leaving a bloody trail across the floor as his side opens up and he wails against his will. His wand hand shakes violently as it comes up again. "Expul—" And again he's knocked back, this time with a fresh wound to his chest. 

Griselda is so much more powerful than him. He knows it. He's slow with pain and fatigue, and she's a rested predator circling him. The likelihood of her defeat is low, but he will _keep_ trying to speak every blasting spell he knows until either he dies for his efforts or until one hits. And then he will keep trying some more. "Bomba—" She slices him down the middle of his abdomen and his new scream is barely distinguishable from the constant sobbing that won't stop coming out of him. 

Her laughter is infrequent now, punctuated with bored sighs. Her swipes are lazy. She won't keep this up for much longer. " _C-Confring—_ " 

The pain of the Cruciatus curse hasn't been familiar in a long time, and yet Draco remembers it vividly as it floods his body. Every time he was punished for being a failure as a Death Eater, or every time he was a stress reliever for Voldemort or any of his followers looking for a terrible outlet, all of them pale in comparison to the sheer magnitude of Griselda's Crucio. He can't even hear himself screaming anymore. 

And just as suddenly, it's gone. 

Harry strides toward Griselda, his face a mask of rage, his magic one wordless concussive blast after another that keeps her off her feet. She snarls at him from her place on the floor, and he staggers back, but then he throws his arm out and she's pinned, spread-eagle, to the wall. Draco's vision is darkening, narrowing. The brick grows chains, ropes, vines, anything it seems Harry can think of to bind her there. It doesn't stop her, of course, and Harry is blown back again by several feet. 

Countless red bolts shoot, one after another, from behind Harry and Draco, hitting Griselda squarely in the head and chest. A mass of Aurors thunder past, swarming her. 

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he thinks he hears Harry saying, over the noise of bodies slamming into each other, and he thinks, too, that he's being cradled against Harry's chest. 

Draco doesn't remember anything after that.

☾

It might be the smells that wake Draco up, a heady, astringent combination of healing potions that fills the air. Or the strange, soft bedding beneath him, so unlike his firm back-breaking mattress in the manor. It might be the distant sounds of chatter, of shoes clicking hurriedly across tile, of quills scribbling.

Draco's body aches; that's the next thing he's aware of. He feels out of sync, his body a lead weight that accepts little to no input from his sluggish brain. 

"Draco." 

He doesn't like the feeling of bright light needling his eyeballs. The memory of Griselda restoring his sight is still fresh. He tries to put a hand over his eyes and doesn't get much more than moving his hand from his side to his thigh. 

"Draco!" 

Draco knows that voice, of course. He doesn't like how agitated it sounds, though. He knows, too, the hand that's clasping his, squeezing gently. 

Harry. Draco finally looks up and sees Harry. 

"You're finally awake, you stupid bastard," Harry says, his choked smile at odds with his red eyes. 

"Oh, don't be so dramatic," Draco murmurs, taking better stock of himself now that his eyes have adjusted. He's tucked into a hospital bed, angled up just enough to see Harry without craning his neck, and he's swathed in what feels like a sea of bandages. His left forearm, in particular, is bulky with it. "What's it been, an hour?" 

"A day. I should kill you." Harry scrubs the back of his hand across his eyes. "Why did you do it?" 

"What, sleep for a day?" Draco realizes now that the itch he's been feeling is a lock of hair poking him between the eyes, and he starts trying to blow it away from his forehead, mostly in vain. It pokes him in the eye, instead. "I didn't do it on purpose. Take it up with the Sleeping Draught they gave me." He assumes that's what it was, anyway. 

Harry doesn't laugh. "You didn't wake me." 

Draco shrugs as much as he's able. "You were asleep." 

Harry scoffs. "So you go off to face the source of _the Rabid Dog Curse_ by yourself? Because I was asleep? That's all you've got for being so fucking _stupid?"_

Draco can feel himself coloring as he snaps, "I wasn't being stupid! I knew you'd be a target!" He winces when he catches himself leaning forward; the slashes in his abdomen must not be done healing, even with St. Mungo's best healing magic on hand. Harry's hand presses against his good shoulder, pushing him back down to the bed. 

"Be careful with yourself," Harry sighs. "Of course I'm a target. I'm the bloody Head Auror. That's not a reason." 

"I don't mean because of that." Draco settles back into the bed, wiggling his shoulders until the wound in his right one reminds him he oughtn't. "Because you're powerful, Harry. Exactly the kind of powerful wizard Griselda would want to drain of magic." 

"I wouldn't let her." 

Draco sighs, too, looking Harry up and down. He looks so fiercely confident—he wouldn't let her. "Of course you'd say that." 

"I just—alright, let's say that's a really good point, and I should have never been at the scene because Griselda Yaxley could have drained all my power like some kind of magic mosquito," Harry says, flapping one hand near his face as if to wave off said mosquito. "You could have told me as much, and then you could have waited for the blasted Aurors to arrive!" 

"If I'd told you, would you have listened? Or would you have charged on ahead and made me stay behind?" Draco huffs as he meets Harry's gaze with his own defiant one. "I did what I thought was right. I'm not sorry." 

"What if you'd died?" Harry wants to know, desperation coloring his voice, and the way he pushes at his hair—out in full curliness, Draco notes. So much for not debuting new old looks at St. Mungo's. "Would that have been right?" 

Draco considers the way Harry is looking at him, so full of so many emotions Draco can barely pick them out from each other. Anger, certainly. Sadness, which is a surprise; Draco can't really fathom anyone being sad over the prospect of his death except for his mother. Everything else Draco sees in those burning green eyes is too big for him to contemplate and he turns his face away. 

"Draco, don't ignore me. Answer me." 

"It might have been," Draco murmurs, tracing limp fingers over the bandage on his forearm. 

Draco yelps with pain as Harry all but grabs him by the face, forcing him to face Harry's furious eyes, his furrowed brow, his snarling mouth. "No! The answer is supposed to be no!" 

And as quickly as Harry's grabbed him, Harry lets go, falling back into his chair and pushing his face into his hands. "I'm sorry. But no, Draco." 

Draco bites his lip, frowning. "Is it so different from the way you and your Aurors put your lives on the line? It was for something important." 

"Of course it's different." Harry lets his hands fall from his face as he sits back up, leaning back to rest his arms on the chair's. "We're—we're trained professionals. We sign on for the job." 

"I signed a contract." 

"To do research!" Harry throws his hands up. "Not to—to throw yourself at danger after fifteen years of not doing magic, much less trained defensive magic, Draco!" 

Draco nearly shouts _I can do magic!_ like a petulant infant, but he knows there's a difference between being able to remember second year dueling club spells and what Harry can do. What most magical adults can do, really, ones not deprived of the ability to do magic for half their lives. And he knows, all too well, he'd been well out of his league when it came to Griselda. He knows, most of all, he's only alive because of Griselda's apparent predilection toward playing with her food. 

"Don't you know you're worth more than that?" comes Harry's voice, suddenly so much smaller. 

Dr. Fiddlewood wouldn't want him to say he isn't. She would want him to agree with Harry. "I don't know," he says, splitting it down the middle. 

"You are." Harry leans close again, sweeping aside the hair that's been plaguing Draco's eyes. "Oh, Draco." 

"Don't butter me up," Draco says, letting his eyes slide closed. "My head's big enough already. Look at my forehead." 

"Fucking enormous," Harry whispers, planting a kiss on that forehead. "You're right. My apologies, your highness." 

Draco snorts, pawing Harry's face away with his better hand. "Incorrigible. Absolutely horrible. Don't kiss me anymore." Harry laughs, just for a moment, kissing Draco's hand as it bats at him instead. And then—

"You don't know, Draco, when I saw you on the floor in that—that place—" Harry presses his cheek to Draco's forehead, overheating him with his furnace of a face, but Draco says nothing. "There was so much blood coming out of you." 

"Stop, someone might think you like me," Draco says, murmuring again. "How embarrassing for you." Harry snorts above him, then sniffles as he sobers again. 

"Do you know, that house was one I raided when I first got promoted? I thought I got everyone, and now look. You almost died because of me." 

"Oh, don't start," Draco groans. "I don't want you finding a way to make this your fault, or a reason you're still too dangerous and now you've got to go wobbly-charm your hair off again and abandon everyone for another five years, myself included." 

"Hey!" Harry sits up, and Draco juts his chin at him, glaring. 

"I mean it, Harry! I made the decision to go in there, _you_ didn't somehow make it for me five bloody years ago." 

"Ah." Harry takes Draco's hand again. "So you agree, you were stupid to go off on your own without waiting for trained officers of the law to lead the charge?" And he grins, the wanker. 

"I never said that." Draco lets Harry kiss his fingers. "I'll _never_ admit to being stupid." Not to other people, anyway. He admits it to himself in his head all the time. 

"Pity, bet your therapist would say it's great progress." Harry kisses Draco's hand again. "Never scare me like that again, Draco." He swallows, rolling his lips between his teeth. "You can say it wasn't my fault all you like, but I still saw you bleeding out in front of me." 

Draco could keep snarking, make some remark about liking a life of danger, taking Harry's job, _maybe bleeding out is my fetish and you're in for a wild ride, Potter,_ but he just nods. "Alright, Harry." And then, because he can't help himself, "If I remember." 

"Git," Harry chuckles, though it doesn't reach his eyes, still heavy with meaning. 

Eventually, Harry has to leave his side; the Griselda Yaxley case needs processing. Her wandless, wordless magic is so powerful that she's kept under heavy sedation, tended to hourly by guarded orderlies whose first priority is that she stay unconscious. Nobody is sure what else to do with her; a Dementor-less Azkaban is no more likely to hold her than anywhere else, and Draco doubts even Dementors would phase her. Meanwhile, Venari Virtute itself goes unbroken, barely kept from spreading by the Ministry while its current victims' magic goes on feeding Griselda's. 

There is, at least, no doubt that she's guilty. Draco's first words to the Aurors who interview him at St. Mungo's are to say that he'll bear witness at her trial, assuming the Wizengamot don't simply throw the book at her. 

Pansy, Blaise and Greg come as one to see Draco in hospital, and all three are delightfully awful in their own way. Greg apparently tried to bring Draco some of his first batch of homebrew, to which St. Mungo's staff put a very firm stop. Blaise says Draco looks awful and showers him with some of the luxury items companies have already paid for Blaise to wear, telling Draco these will help. And Pansy—

"If you'd actually fucked Potter, maybe you wouldn't have gone rushing into danger to face down a wanted criminal," Pansy says, right in front of their whole little social circle, hand clearly itching for a wine glass or cigarette as she gesticulates with it. 

"Potter?" Greg asks. 

"Oh, Pansy, stop being so crass," Blaise says with a smirk. 

"I did something important!" Draco protests. 

"Right, you bled all over the criminal, that surely showed her," Blaise drawls. 

"What about Potter?" Greg wants to know. 

"I don't remember any Griselda from school, do you?" Pansy asks. 

"How would you remember someone too young to have ever attended at the same time as you?" Blaise snorts. "Nobody believes you're in your twenties, Pansy." 

"Stop, I've never lied about my age. I'm a fun 33." Her fingers wiggle. "Ooh, I'd die for a smoke. I've had enough of watching you soak up all the attention like you did third year for that thing with the hippogriff, Draco, I'm off." 

"But you did all the talking!" Draco tells Pansy's retreating back. 

"You know, I think I knew a Griselda," Greg muses. "That bugger Yaxley's daughter. Horrible little girl." 

"You were a horrible little boy," Blaise reminds Greg. 

"Yeah, but not like her," Greg replies with a shrug. 

"Aren't any of you going to pay any attention to _me_ , the invalid?" Draco huffs. He's not much of an invalid now, St. Mungo's Healers having done their job well; while the Sectumsempra cuts will, like his other ones, scar with no chance of removal, and while he'll need to keep the bandage on over his Dark Mark for longer yet, he's more or less healed up. His primary Healer just wants him to stay overnight to make sure he's rested, not scrambling off to get injured all over again. She said something curt about knowing the types that associate with Harry Potter. 

"No, you're much more interesting on your feet," Blaise says with a sly wink. "Enjoy my gifts, Draco, we'll be off." 

"But you were here for all of five minutes," Draco says as his friends amble out, Greg following Blaise with an _Oh, are we leaving? Do you think they'll let me have my brews back?_

In the morning, Draco's Healer says he's free to go, then asks him, now that his contract with the Ministry is up, if he wouldn't bring his research to St. Mungo's to help them cure the victims of the Rabid Dog Curse. 

Right. The case is over. Draco pretends he's only just remembered he'll have to turn over his wand. 

He says yes, of course. He wants to be the kind of person who says yes, so he will be. 

Dr. Fiddlewood will get such a kick out of all of this. 

Draco goes first to the manor, because as much as he loves that Harry brought him clothes from his own wardrobe at Grimmauld Place to wear, they're much too big, and Draco doesn't want to smell like hospital anymore. He wants to smell like his tea tree oil soap and lemon verbena shampoo; he wants to smell like himself, without the lingering scent of blood and fear and Sleeping Draught. 

He finds he suddenly can't go in the kitchen anymore. Draco looks at the table and his body seizes up, pain blossoming in all the places it remembers Griselda opening him up. Another one of Dr. Fiddlewood's ghosts that lives in the manor, keeping him from yet another part of his childhood home. 

Harry is surprised but thrilled to see him so soon after his discharge. 

Draco wants nothing more than to lose himself in Harry, to kiss him until his lips go numb, to finally take Pansy's pseudo-advice and have I-almost-died sex with Harry, bandages be damned. To do something with his body other than be frightened. But Harry, annoying in his kindness and his sixth sense for trauma, kisses him slowly, comfortingly on the sofa, and asks Draco how he's really feeling. 

"That's for you to wonder and for Dr. Fiddlewood to find out," Draco mumbles into Harry's chest, before confessing exactly what happened in the kitchen of the manor. 

Harry fixes them tea afterward. Draco notes, with mixed feelings, that while he's not treated to any more flowering jasmine tea, Harry's procured a tea strainer for him in the shape of a gormless-looking giraffe, and filled it with loose Assam. He chooses not to comment on it, especially when he sees that Harry's drinking PG Tips, a Muggle brand he _knows_ to be bottom of the barrel and if he says one thing about the tea, he'll say everything about the tea. 

And when they've nearly finished drinking, Harry suggests they take a trip to Chudley. Draco almost spits out the last of his tea. 

"You mean _you're_ going to Chudley, and this is your way of telling me to go home," Draco says, setting his teacup down a little too firmly. 

"No, I'm not telling you to go home." 

"So you want me to stay cooped up in your house while you flit off to the countryside, is it?" Draco knows that's not it, either, his voice pitching a little too high as he crosses one leg over the other, then switches them. 

"Do you really want the last interaction you've had with my friends to be caught kissing behind Ron's parents' house before shrieking goodbye and Disapparating?" Harry asks, smugness pulling at the corners of his lips. 

"Alright firstly, I didn't _shriek_ anything, and secondly, it's not like we were snogging! It was a peck on the lips, and _you_ started it, not me!" 

"You're a bit shrieky now," Harry snickers. 

"I am not. I'm grumbly." Draco weaves his fingers together across his lap, frowning as he leans against the back of his chair. "What do you want me there for? Don't you want an intimate reconnection with Granger and Weasley?" 

"Well, yes." Something is making the floor vibrate irritatingly under Draco's feet, and when he looks for the source, he realizes Harry is jiggling his leg under the table. "I just thought—" Harry takes a horrible loud suck of his oversteeped tea. "It might be nice to introduce my—my boyfriend." 

"Your—?" Draco feels the hot red flush hit him as though he's been splashed with paint. 

"Or just, you know, introduce _you_ , properly, and not as like, Malfoy brought the wine!" Harry says with a nervous, hiccuping chuckle, his words jumbling together. "It doesn't have to be that word. If you don't want it to be." 

"I—" Draco twists his woven fingers against each other until it hurts. His mouth is as dry as if he'd never had any tea at all. "N—" He swallows, and Harry watches him as though his life is on the line. "No, of course I want it to be, but—is that what _you_ want?" 

Harry throws his arms up, laughing in exasperation. "Of course it is, I'm the one who said it! Look, I'll do it properly, instead of sneaking it in like that." Harry hurls himself from his chair to balance on one knee on the floor in front of Draco, taking both of Draco's hands. "Draco Whatever-Your-Middle-Name-Is Malfoy, will you be my boyfriend?" 

"That's not properl—I mean, yes. Yes!" Draco wants to slap himself for being such a pedant at such a crucial moment, but Harry's got both of his hands. Then Harry's pulling Draco down to the floor, too, laughing at the way Draco yelps before they kiss. 

"Ugh, there must be a better term than boyfriend," Draco says breathlessly, propping himself up over Harry's chest once they break away. "I'm in my thirties, not thirteen. And it sounds so _American._ "

"Trust you to nitpick a word like boyfriend right after you said you want that for us," Harry laughs softly, pushing a fallen lock of Draco's hair back into place. 

"I just don't want you to think it's what you want after—" Draco sits up to count on his fingers, straddling Harry's hips. "Well, it's only been a week since your little romantic picnic, and not even two months since the start of the case." 

"Known you a bit longer than that," Harry murmurs, running his palms up and down the tops of Draco's thighs. "What, do you think you tricked me into asking you out?" 

"Slytherins are known for their trickery, Malfoys particularly so," Draco says with a pompous air that sounds oddly like Horace Slughorn. "And you can't tell me you've been planning this since we were eleven, Harry." 

"Stop making everything so complicated," Harry says with a roll of his eyes, but he looks affectionate, not annoyed. "There doesn't have to be a logical equation to someone wanting to be with you, Draco." 

"Can't I want one anyway?" 

"Well," and Harry winces slightly, "maybe not on the floor. That was my mistake." They begin the process of collecting themselves up off the floorboards, Harry's body in particular full of the aches of a man in a physically demanding career, Draco's full of the pains of healing from recent torture. They lay themselves onto the sofa like a couple of pensioners, slow and deliberate followed by _oof!_ s when their arses finally hit the cushions. 

"Alright, comfortable seat, logical equation, go," Draco prods, without waiting another second. 

"Well it's not that simple, is it?" Harry says with a little scoff, taking Draco's hand. "But I suppose it does mean something that I've known you for the better part of my life, even if there was a big gap in the middle. It means," and Harry speaks slower now, as if he's telling himself as much as he's telling Draco, "that I can see how much you've grown. Draco the man is not the same person as Draco the boy." He rolls his bottom lip between his teeth, chewing thoughtfully. "I can see how hard you've worked. How determined you are to be the good person you always could be." 

"I don't know about always," Draco mutters, pillowing his head against Harry's muscular shoulder. "But I suppose I'm trying." Dr. Fiddlewood would like him saying that. _He_ likes saying that. 

"Does that mean you'll stop fussing so much and let me enjoy you?" Harry asks above Draco's head, and Draco luxuriates in the way Harry's voice rumbles through his body. 

"For now." He could fall asleep this way. 

"Then let's be off to Chudley." Harry gets up abruptly, as though he hadn't just been doing his best impression of an elderly man, leaving Draco's head to drop onto the cushions below. 

"Hey!" Draco pushes himself up on his arms, glaring at Harry. "Does no one care I'm an invalid? Stop jostling me around!" 

"Oh, I'll jostle you around, then you'll see," Harry says with a wicked bounce of his eyebrows, and Draco sinks back down into the couch, hiding his red face by frowning aggressively into a throw pillow. Harry laughs so hard he starts coughing. 

Weasley is the one to open the door of the Chudley cottage, Hugo's suspicious little face poking out from behind Weasley's hip. Ron's hip, he ought to say. He's met too many Weasleys now to call him anything else. 

"I told you, you can't have my mum," Hugo tells Draco before Ron's massive freckled hand covers his son's face, pushing him backward into the house. 

"Well, can't say as I'm surprised to see the pair of you," Ron says, with a face that struggles to stay smooth. "I'll, er, I'll put the kettle on." 

This time Draco gets to meet the elder Granger-Weasley child, a fearless little girl with her mother's masses of hair in her father's flaming red color who darts around Harry and Draco as they walk into the house. The interior of the house feels Burrow-like, but with an organized hand taken to it, which seems about right given its occupants. 

"I told Hugo you weren't after our mum, you know," the girl—Rose?—tells Draco, matter of fact as she continues to almost step on his toes. "I know about gay people." 

Harry breaks out into guffaws he can barely contain behind one hand as Draco's ears go hot. "Is that right?" Draco asks faintly. 

"Rose!" Granger's voice rings out, and Rose looks utterly nonplussed as she calls back with a _Yes mum!_ and skips ahead of Harry and Draco. 

"Honestly, I don't know what to do with either of my children," Granger says with a defeated sigh, gesturing at Rose as the girl skips right past her and out into the garden. "Sorry, Harry." 

"No! No, not at all," Harry says with the last of his laughter, before taking a seat at the kitchen table with Granger. "I mean, good that she, er, knows about gay people." 

"I know, but _manners,_ " Granger huffs into her hands. "Malf—Draco? What shall I call you?" Suddenly her attention is turned on Draco, and he puts a nervous hand to his collarbone before he can stop himself. 

"Draco is fine," he manages, barely. 

"Then," Granger says, with a surreptitious glance at Harry, "I'm Hermione, and that's Ron." She points at her husband, clattering away with the kettle nearby. "Have a seat, _Draco._ " 

Draco knows the emphasis on his name comes from her trying to hammer home that they'll all be on a first name basis going forward, but he can't help getting a chill as he does as he's told and finds a seat by Harry, wedged in the corner of the kitchen. 

"Here we are," Ron says, laying out a hodgepodge of mugs with the same tea Draco had been served at the Burrow. As he pours boiling water from the kettle over each one, he says, gruffly, "Haven't quite got the same knack for kitchen magic as Mum," as if he's embarrassed he has to hold the kettle with his hands. 

"You could try," Hermione says with a bemused voice, and gives Ron a peck on the cheek as he pours her cup. 

"I do try!" Ron protests as he returns the kettle to the kitchen. "My mum set a very high bar!" 

Harry just looks so fond, watching his friends bicker, that Draco's heart aches a little. He must have missed this every day of his self-imposed exile. He also feels, again, like he ought not be here, but Harry's made such a good case, after all. 

"So, Harry," Ron says, in a man-of-the-house voice that sounds very much put-on, "what's brought you to our table today?" 

"Ah, well," Harry says, scratching at the back of his hairline, "I feel like I could do better for a reunion than getting sauced and shouting at Seamus, before being Apparated to the moon, is all." 

"And how was the moon?" Hermione asks, looking slyly at Draco. 

"I'm never putting quill to paper again," Draco mutters. 

"Not as chilly as you'd think," Harry replies. 

"You're all barmy," Ron snorts. 

"And, er, I thought I might also introduce you to Draco," Harry continues, to which Ron and Hermione both frown. 

"Introduce us, mate?" Ron scoffs. "I don't know if you remember, but we've met." 

"Oh!" Hermione gets it first. "Oh, Ron, don't be thick! They're _dating_ , Harry came to tell us." 

"What?" Ron looks at his wife, then at Harry, blinking rapidly. "Is that true, Harry?" 

"Well, you didn't have to shout it out, Hermione," Harry says, sheepishly, "but yeah, as of a bit earlier today, yeah." 

"Should've seen it coming," Ron says, putting his face into his mug and taking a steady sip. 

"What's that supposed to mean?" Harry wants to know. 

"He knows what that means," Hermione says to Draco in a conspiratorial voice, to which Draco says nothing because he wants well out of it. 

"I don't!" Harry protests. 

"Now who's the shrieky one?" Draco asks, and Ron bursts out laughing. 

"Oh, mate, this is too weird," Ron says when he's recovered, wiping tears from one eye. "But you can't pretend you weren't mad for him in sixth year." 

"Now wait just a minute—" Harry's getting up out of his seat, and Draco pulls him back down, because he wants to hear _all_ about this. 

"Yes, we all know, Draco was hatching an evil plot," Hermione says, with the weary singsong of someone who's said this many times before. "We also all know that didn't mean you had to watch his comings and goings in the dead of night." 

"It was due diligence," Harry says, jabbing a finger into the table top. "Constant vigilance!" 

"I shared a dorm with you," Ron says, leaning forward to pin Harry with such a look of finality that Harry leans back in turn, looking thoroughly flustered. It's clearly a checkmate. Draco thinks he understands from context, especially given the way Hermione seems to have excused herself from the conversation and right into her mug, but oh, he's going to enjoy dragging that one out of Harry later. 

From there, Hermione calls the children into the kitchen to introduce them properly to Harry. Rose is eager to prove she knows all about Harry, with a rapidfire listing of all of Harry's most famous moments, and Ron pulls her away with an _Alright, darling, I'm sure he's impressed._ Hugo's contribution is to say, "I thought you were dead." 

The visit goes on so long that Harry joins Ron in the kitchen to fix dinner, leaving Draco alone with Hermione. It's strange, he thinks, to be so comfortable with the woman he once tormented. Stranger still for her to laugh at his jokes, invite him to her table, let him meet her children. Out of love for Harry, first and foremost he has no doubt, but Hermione has never struck him as the kind of person who sets aside her principles for someone as technically trivial as her childhood friend's boyfriend. 

Oh, he loves that word in all its newness. Boyfriend. 

"You know," Draco says, fiddling with an errant packet of sugar, "I know I made an attempt at an apology when I blew down the door at the Burrow, looking for Harry, but I think it was just that. An attempt." 

Hermione says nothing, looking at him expectantly. Of course she wouldn't make it easy for him. 

"There is no excuse for how I treated you." He can imagine Dr. Fiddlewood in the wings of the proverbial stage of his mind, mouthing along and encouraging him to keep going. "I was a child, but so were you. I am—" Draco licks his lips, frowning. "I am trying to not be my father's son. I am trying to do better. And I'm sorry. For everything." 

For a moment, Hermione's cool gaze makes Draco think he should have kept his mouth shut, let their strange peace continue unaddressed. Then she reaches for his hand, and Draco lets her take it, unsure but willing to do anything. 

"It's not as simple as saying all is forgiven," Hermione says, just soft enough for Draco's ears and not for the men bustling in the kitchen. "I was genuinely traumatized, navigating so much bigotry—as a girl, as a Black girl, and then learning at eleven there was yet one more thing people could want to hate me for. To hurt me for." 

Draco swallows, but he at least senses now is when he should be quiet. 

"But I see how much you care for Harry, and I see, even from our scant few meetings, how hard you're working to be better. It gives me genuine hope to see you, son of Lucius Malfoy, the boy who—who made it his _mission_ to make me feel awful about myself, who watched me be tortured by a madwoman—" 

Draco flinches, and Hermione shakes her head before she begins again. "It gives me hope that my children will grow up unencumbered by the kind of bigotry you introduced me to when I was their age. And for that, Draco, I'm thankful." She squeezes Draco's hand, and lets go. 

"What're you hens gabbling about?" Ron calls from the kitchen, and Hermione's indignation paints itself all over her face as she tells her husband what she thinks of his question. Draco is just grateful to Ron for breaking the tension, knowingly or not. 

Dinner is simple fare, hot and well seasoned, and it's another lesson to Draco that the best food is not always the most expensive. The children join them at the table and absolutely dominate all conversation; Draco is more than fine with that. He feels Hermione's presence acutely, and he wonders if he's going to have to have a similarly difficult conversation with Ron; it seems like a fifty-fifty chance to him. 

"I mean what I said," Hermione says to Draco in a low voice during farewells. "I'm happy you're changing. Changed. Both." 

"Is that what you said?" Draco asks, before he can stop himself. 

"Well, what I tried to say, anyway," she says, with a contrite smile. "I saw you looking at me at dinner like I was the wolf to your sheep. I'm not going to kill you." And then, with a thoughtful upward glance, "Not for any old reasons, anyway. Don't give me any new ones." 

"I," Draco says, "promise I will do my absolute best not to give you any new reasons to kill me. Truly." 

"Good." Her firm hand on his shoulder still gives him pause. "I'm happy for you and Harry. Come by again." 

"Sure," Draco says, weakly, still feeling as though he's just barely escaped this whole evening with his life. 

"Don't do our Harry wrong," Ron tells Draco next, in that same put-on deep voice as he'd used earlier. 

"I might do him wrong," Harry remarks behind them. 

"Bloke like Draco looks like he needs a bit of doing wrong," Ron says, leaving Draco absolutely baffled and Hermione putting her face in her hand. 

"Right then," Harry says, "lovely to see you and your family, nutters that you all are. Bye." He pulls Draco tight to his body, and Side-Alongs him back to Grimmauld Place.

☾

"I didn't think it'd be so close," Harry says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he looks over the building.

"You know, I didn't think about it until now," Draco says, standing by the door that goes straight upstairs. "Convenient, though, isn't it?" 

"Yeah." Harry looks up and down the road, as though watching for shadowy attackers in broad daylight in Islington. 

Draco sighs, and walks over to where Harry's standing, six feet away. "If you're not ready, Harry, then you're not ready. We can go. There's a little cafe round the corner I like, and I want to see if noted hermit Head Auror Potter has ever been." 

"You can't call me that title anymore, it doesn't apply," Harry mumbles with a little smile. 

"Ah, it does until my team and I get every last drop of magic back out of Griselda Yaxley," Draco says. "You promised. _And_ that’s how you got the Ministry to give me my wand back permanently. Enjoy the prestige and power while you still have it." 

"No more field work, though," Harry says. 

"No more field work," Draco agrees. "Just training your replacement." 

"Williamson's always been more suited, they just wanted the glamour of my name, I think." Harry leans into Draco, a silent request to be embraced, and Draco gives it to him. "He won't need training." 

For a moment, they just stand there, pressed chest to chest and listening to the ambient sounds of the neighborhood. 

"Are you ready, Harry?" Draco whispers into the crown of Harry's head. 

A pause. Then Harry nods. 

"You first, then." Draco unhooks himself from Harry, and gestures toward the door leading up to Dr. Fiddlewood's office. 

Harry opens the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you again to all my readers—beta, alpha, and here on ao3! 
> 
> i made a little art for the occasion: http://softfart.tumblr.com/post/184179639697/


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